Having fast, efficient, and trustworthy support is extremely important for all Office 365 customers. Whether you are an IT admin in an enterprise company with thousands of employees, or the owner of a flower shop with five employees, you depend on Microsoft to provide excellent support so you can focus on your business.

Based on customer feedback, we’ve updated the Office 365 support experience to provide you with faster and more efficient support that helps you to get the most value out of Office 365. The new experience will be rolling out over the next couple of weeks and will be available to all customers by the end of October.

The new support experience provides several major enhancements:

Inline, simplified support experience

Easy access to support – To connect you to support assistance as quickly as possible, we’ve put the “Need help” button on the bottom-right corner of each page in the Office 365 admin portal. You can now quickly open a new ticket and track existing ones from wherever you are within the Office 365 admin portal.

Quickly open a support ticket by clicking on the “Need help” button

Your choice of support – Support issues vary in nature and complexity – and while sometimes you want to talk to a support agent directly, in other situations it’s more convenient to solve the topic independently. In the “Need help” pane, you can choose between several options – ranging from self-help tools to being contacted by a support agent. Simply type in your issue and click on “Get help.”  We’ll give you suggested solutions or options to contact support. Only your contact information is needed to create the ticket.

Please note: We apologize for the inconvenience that some customers were not able to open multiple tickets and view their ticket history during the rollout process. We have brought back that functionality to all customers and are working to add back the ability to add attachments by end of October.

Your choice of support

Intelligence built-in

Proactive support – Instead of waiting for you to call us, if we detect certain issues with your service – for example failures in your experience with Skype for Business calls – we will give you a courtesy call proactively and walk you through how to fix the issue. If you miss the call, you will be able to view a summary of the guidance in the Message Center.

Automatic classification and routing of tickets – In the new experience, we’re taking the guess work out of ticket creation. By leveraging machine learning, we automatically classify the information you tell us about your issue to route the ticket to the right support agent for shorter resolution time. All you have to do is to provide a short description of your issue.

Personalized self-service options – Many of our customers want to solve their issues themselves. To enable you to better do so, we’re improving the self-service support recommendations to be more intelligent and personalized. Recommendations are now based on both information you provide and our telemetry data. Based on this information, we not only point you to further relevant resources – such as troubleshooting tools, videos, or help articles – but in many cases, we also directly recommend a specific action for you in-line to solve the problem.Telemetry Based Recommendations

Faster connection with support

Quick callbacks – Customers have shared that they want more clarity around when they will be contacted by support and an ability to ensure the call back will come at a convenient time.  In the new experience, we strive to call back you back in 20 minutes or less so that you can get help — when it’s convenient for you — by clicking on “Let us call you”.

Request a call on an existing ticket – If you need immediate help on an ongoing issue, there’s no need to create a new ticket and start from scratch – simply request a call on the existing case using the “Call me” button and the next available agent will call you back in about 10 minutes.

More to come

This is just the beginning. Our goal is to provide you with a smarter and more personalized support experience that helps you assure users’ productivity. We’re working on various enhancements that will roll out in the coming months, including the ability to see detailed solutions steps for tickets that have been closed.

Let us know what you think!

Try the support experience in the Office 365 admin center and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower right corner in the admin center. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure the Office 365 support experience meets your needs.

– Anne Michels, @Anne_Michels, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 Marketing team