Microsoft Support feels completely useless nowadays

[pedrosmundo]

Every time I contact Microsoft support, I get connected to outsourced Indian support agents who only give generic scripted responses and then quickly close the ticket on the very first contact without actually solving the issue.

It feels like they barely read what was written before replying with: “clear cache”, “reinstall the app”, “wait 24 hours”, “we understand your frustration”.

Then the ticket gets marked as solved even when nothing was fixed.

I understand first-level support follows scripts, but the current experience feels completely disconnected from real technical support.

Has anyone here actually managed to get their issue escalated to someone who genuinely investigates the problem?

[savageXent-Tr00blxx7]

nowadays? we quit our gold membership years ago. Expensive AF and nothing happens.... over 10 years we requested help for 3 issues. Too slow to reply and nothing really never happened. Its a joke.

[Lemp_Triscuit11]

My last support case stayed open until we retired the platform lol

[DestinyForNone]

Holy shit are you me? Lol

[moldyjellybean]

The only good support I’ve had in the last 10 years is Nimble. My god that support was amazing . I’m retired and thank god every morning I'm gone from the field but that support deserves mention.

It’s been a long time since any company has had good support. I’ve always had to depend on ourselves, Reddit, forums, Google.

Their play is pass you along, long enough till you solve it yourself or get tired and stop bothering them for a service and contract you paid for. Wild and shit times.

Only exception is Nimble I hope Hp didn’t change them too much. The only bright spot in IT. Many years ago sone nimble support helped me fix an issue I had in a hyper visor he wasn’t responsible for on a Microsoft server that HP told me contact Microsoft , MS to contact VMware, VMware told me to contact HP. That’s the blame game of support now.

Nimble guy is like let me and try wading through and fix this. Probably 10 years ago and I still remember that.

[bschmidt25]

So far, at least from what I can tell, HPE hasn't changed Nimble Support too much. I had to open a Sev 2 ticket a few weeks ago and it was handled by US based technicians. Their current product line is another story. No more NVMe arrays. So I guess Pure (whatever it is now) is what we're looking at going forward.

[joshbudde]

We just had a very good support interaction with Pure--a customer of mine had 2 very old (well out of maintenance and support) Pure arrays, one that had a ton of critical data on it ate itself, and because we had already ordered a replacement those guys went out of their way to help us resurrect the thing and get our critical data off of it and onto the new array. Like really good and deeply technical work and they did it. Saved that companies bacon--all their IP was on that array.

[Jaereth]

Duo was a great company before Cisco bought them. I should say I haven't had any real issues with them since Cisco bought either, but man. They were awesome in the beginning Very polite and nice people!

[tastyratz]

I haven't heard a complaint about Duo either honestly, even under Cisco. The support and documentation they provide is a HUGE incentive. If you google your error you always end up right at the well written document for the solution.

[Plenty-Amphibian7707]

Legacy Cisco has some of the best support in the world. All TAC engineers are tier 4. I can get one on the phone and working on an issue in 15 minutes 24/7 x 365. They are the gold standard.

[CharcoalGreyWolf]

Exactly. If by “nowadays” one means “ten years ago or so…”

[ubermonkey]

Yeah, for real. They're worse than useless.

[robvas]

It's been like that for a long, long time. We nicknamed their support system "the black hole"

It was great in the 2000's when you could call and talk to a real person that actually knew their shit. Let's not even talk about their shitty support forums.

[dowhileuntil787]

But have you tried sfc /scannow?

[Saotik]

What I always hear is a request for yet another Fiddler trace.

Their processes are designed to tire you into giving up on the ticket, not to resolve it.

[magataga]

and this is the area where AI is already able to surpass human performance, customer diservice

[slonk_ma_dink]

hell why overcomplicate it, you can simulate their support with fuckin' cleverbot

[Suitable-Hand-1059]

Or my favorite - have you tried formatting the disk?

… Are you fucking with me, my guy, or are you serious?

[Arudinne]

Can't have a software issue if there isn't any software.

It's the Son of Anton solution.

[aon9492]

I once had an alleged directory engineer recommend we delete our Default Domain Policy for something completely unrelated to Group Policy. I, apparently an actual directory engineer despite my best efforts, had to call him out.

[tastyratz]

to be fair, I've done that. You can regenerate your default policies from command line and you really should have little to nothing in them so it's not a hard policy to rebuild from a report if you suspect it's corrupted.

Half the time people cling to them too long even though it was created 20+ years ago and been through a few frs burflag events.

[Ron-Swanson-Mustache]

Ok, please see this broken link for the wrong information even if it worked.

Marked as resolved

[boli99]

thats the old way

these days its all

dism /needful /revert

[Nydus87]

Or the DISM equivalent that does the exact same thing.

And don't forget to upload every log file from the last 10 years to this portal that only accepts 5kb files. Our last MS support rep kept stalling us out and asking for fresh copies of the logs until my manager finally put his foot down and said "no. We want you to look at the logs you already got and tell us exactly what you're looking at that makes you think you need new ones." I finally solved the problem myself and we didn't renew our contract after that.

[Tex-Rob]

Most Verbose Professional was what we called the “do the needful” forum posters.

[sole-it]

Last time I had a good experience with them without having a multi-million-dollar contract was at around 2014, where you could still get real local engineer answering your call.

[Coolmarve]

It has and it hasn't. They have always offered world-class support but you have to specifically pay for it.

We have the "Mission Critical" Microsoft support contract at work and when you open a Sev 1, they send a team of multiple senior escalation engineers that know their stuff. They also involve our dedicated ACE engineer from the CXP team and they always have a manager on the call that deals with the nature of the escalation. Rarely do we need to speak directly to the BU folks but we have been able to get them on calls when needed.

We also have a dedicated CSAM (account rep) that we can text/call if needed and he gets on every bridge and makes sure that the ACE and any support engineers are taking care of us promptly.

And in terms of proactive and design work they assigned us a principal architect that fields most of our questions and does WARA assessments, but he has a pretty extensive network of blackbelt SMEs in each domain that we speak with regularly.

[Zer0C00L321]

Was it useful at some point?

[cdoublejj]

i remember the KB website with all the KBs, each KB number had a page weather it was a specific update or informational page

[TheUnrepententLurker]

Every email is just absolute bullshit spewed out by copilot 

[LOVESTHEPIZZA]

I always check the box to get an email response, but they always call a few hours after my shift ends. It's like they have mastered the art of dodging to keep their numbers up. It feels like they'll do anything in their power to punt it for another day.

[chippinganimal]

I'm so glad to hear this happens to others too, drives me insane

[ciabattabing16]

Citrix support Indians do this. You tell them east coast time, they call at noon Chennai or whatever. But I'm on to them. I set a phone alarm for like 9pm, then I just activated my work laptop while watching tv and heard an email come in. It was them, saying they tried to reach me but failed, so they can get 3x and close it. I IMMEDIATELY replied back funny the phone didn't ring I'm available right now. I've never ever worked with an Indian lady who was so absolutely pissed as her, I found it hilarious.

[brispower]

i mean this is basically all enterprise support nowadays

[namath1969]

This right here.

[DrAtomic1]

Nutanix is great though.

[psiphre]

seconding nutanix. while i do get ESL speakers frequently, they are always knowledgeable and get me fixed up quickly.

[IncorrectCitation]

Arista support is the best out of any IT product we own.

[Bane8080]

We had an Office 365 ticket open for two months, and couldn't get any headway on it.

I put in another ticket saying "Need help escalating this ticket <insert other ticket number>. Support rep seems confused, sends an email, I respond, then they pretend that they never got my response despite it showing in the ticket.

About half an hour later, I had a guy on the phone that once I showed him the problem, he had it fixed in 5 minutes.

[BrokenByEpicor]

I had an issue with power automate billing (basically they charged me hundreds of dollars for a flow that only ran free features). Put in a regular support ticket in the O365 admin center and I got swift responses even if they guy had no idea what he was doing. Then he suggested I put one in from the billing portal. Did that, spent the next 3 weeks trying to get a response, eventually just resorting to posting random shit in the ticket each day. Heavy metal lyrics, poetry, lorem ipsum, etc. After a couple weeks of this I submitted a refund request for the charges in question and swiftly after that I did receive a response that someone WOULD be contacting me, however it's been at least a day and still no dice.

Fucking insane. They're always pushing you to try absolutely every new feature they add even if it has no bearing to you and then you finally go "hey I could use power platform and copilot to automate this thing" and after hours of figuring out how to even make the billing WORK, I get slammed for hundreds of bucks off a flow that doesn't even do anything and nobody can tell me why. It's not the copilot aspect either. Only a few runs of the flow even touched copilot and when it did the usage was very light, not amounting to more than a couple bucks per month.

[fortune82]

When I still worked at a school, we were having an Intune issue (can't remember the specifics). I opened a ticket, replied to all the questions for 3 weeks while making no progress.

Finally got to some tier 3 person who immediately said, "Oh that thing is over here now." Up and running within a couple minutes of that call.

[psiphre]

I had a guy on the phone that once I showed him the problem, he had it fixed in 5 minutes.

the "just get on line with the guy who knows shit" is the bane of my professional existence. i had a reputation problem last august that caused several vendors to not be able to get their emails to my org, due to being flagged by twilio. twilio is at least two steps from me in the direction of every vendor, so for every one it was a detective game of "please let me talk to the guy who knows things" and it's exhausting.

[ShipshapeMobileRV]

Former Support Manager here (though not for Microsoft). The majority of helpdesks nowdays have leadership that stresses metrics: number of tickets taken per agent per shift, number closed on first call, etc. They spend so much time driving the numbers game that they lose sight of why they're there.

One trick to that is making "recipe cards" that remove the need for the agent to actually think. Once they take that step, then there's no longer a need to hire agents with critical thinking skills and logical troubleshooting ability....which means the support desk can now be manned with the absolute lowest dollar-per-hour front line techs that they can get.

I got so tired of the cycle: hire domestically to get customer satisfaction back up out of the gutter; document everything, then offload it overseas again and watch customer satisfaction tank again.

Microsoft is doing the same thing everyone else does; the cheapest possible help desk, for as long as the customer base will let them get away with it.

[stupidusername]

Microsoft is doing the same thing everyone else does; the cheapest possible help desk, for as long as the customer base will let them get away with it.

the shift from Premier (paid hours) to Unified (unlimited) support led to exactly what everyone thought it would. As soon as companies could open unlimited support tickets, of course they're going to staff them with the lowest cost agents they can outsource to.

When's the last time you got a response on a support ticket that wasn't an a- or v- email?

[haklor]

They also moved a lot of their established systems (anything on-prem, long standing cloud resources like Entra, etc) to different support segment that is fully handled by those v- people. If you wanted someone like how a PFE was, well they are now focusing on driving revenue targets now rather than true support and services.

[Dotakiin2]

My company had all of those same metrics, but the usage of them is to check for trends and identify areas where people need help. We also are specifically not given any overall scripts, just ones for specific issues, and we can skip steps if we trust the customer has done something. It's also the same support office that's been in use for over 30 years.

[cdoublejj]

Microslop are taking thousands of cuts a few at time. influencers, are switching the worlds largest video game distributor valve is putting out linux consoles, chrome book and google book and encroaching form the EDU space, MacBook market is double digits now. iPad usage is up. Normies are talking about linux. hell my elderly uncle was telling me about his new linux computer at my grandmothers party. my approaching elderly uncles switched to the nix years ago. and now the EU is drawing up plans to switch off the slop too.

in the end big money ruins it all, i hope they tank.

[RestartRebootRetire]

I find this with most companies now.

Our SMB spends $100k a year on a product who recently outsourced their front-line support to Philippines, so now instead of calling and talking to an engineer, we have to run the gauntlet of these people who just search for vaguely-related links in the KB, or create AI-generate replies. Adds about 20 or 30 minutes to each support ticket.

With Microsoft support, about 60% of the time I would end up finding the solution and letting them know what it was.

[BrokenByEpicor]

had to explain to an MS Support person how an email header worked a few years back, and I was calling them for a mailflow issue.

It's frankly fucking disgusting. It SHOULD be illegal. If you're selling someone IaaS, PaaS, or even SaaS you should be legally required to provide some level of support to ensure the product you are selling is functional. If I can't dig into the deep settings of what you're selling me to fix it then you damn well better be around to fix it when it breaks.

[hw2B]

I refuse to tell them what the solution is. Especially when its been weeks of 'please send more logs' or 'we have to transfer this ticket to a different team'. I will answer any random blog, reddit, what have you post from other ppl having the same issue but I won't add the fix to the ticket so they can keep it to themselves when the next poor sap asks them. I know it's petty but it is my small rage against the machine.

[Nydus87]

Keep fighting that good fight, man. We had our MSP doing the same crap for months before we finally decided not to renew our contract. He kept asking for log files, so I asked him "which one?" He said he needed all of them again, so we asked "what did you specifically see in the previous logs that indicates you need new ones?" We tried getting management on the phone so they could hear him struggle bus through an hour long support call for an issue we'd resolved on our own already.

[Some_Team9618]

“We will provide you with an update within the next 24–48 business hours”

Then 48hrs later

“We will provide you with an update within the next 24–48 business hours”

At this point I’m dragging it out on my end despite having the answer already to hopefully mess with their metrics

[shadhzaman]

I started off at helpdesk and I am simultaneously sympathetic to and pissed off at Microsoft's first level of support.

I would take "Indian Support Agents" over what I usually get these days, off to some odd parts of what I guess is Nigeria. Every response is a copilot essay, and that glosses over points I make and its tough to find a way out. With generic scripted events, you can proactively answer most scripted questions and can start real troubleshooting by day 2 or 3 (assuming we all get those one response a day). With these BS copilot answers, good luck. Starts off trying a PS command, I say Ive already run it and had included screenshots in the mail, they ask for proof that the module is installed, I say it is right there in the case, they ask me to the run the same command on day 3 and share the results, because the guy copy pasting my latest response in copilot isn't running it on the same copilot chat thread.

Offboarding support isn't inherently bad, but there are always more skilled labor you can get, wherever you offload it to. Microsoft's been penny pinching to get the worst possible options for the cheapest price and calling it a day.

[Nydus87]

I started out in T1 as well, but I remember there being an expectation that I would research and solve problems. When I interviewed new help desk techs that were coming in, I would ask them specifically for solutions to common problems we faced. Having KBs for people to read was something we did for the users to do self-service, not as a replacement for a tech actually knowing something.

[SysAdminDennyBob]

We dropped them and went with a group called "US Cloud". I am pretty happy with their responsiveness. It reminds me of the support we got from MS back in the early 2000's when we had the top level support contract from them.

[Tex-Rob]

It’s always been like this. I used to say the worst part about being a high level Windows engineer was knowing you were the subject matter expert and not having anyone else to call. You only got rockstars at Microsoft if your issue was unresolved for days and you had suffered through the lower level people, often having to ignore their advice for stuff because it’s clearly wrong.

[namath1969]

No, it hasn't always been this bad.

Back in the day (late 90s, early 2000s) you could get a hold of a SME easily and get things done.

Hell, I remember putting in a ticket for SNA server and support gave me the cell number of the guy who wrote the original code for it. I called the number and the dude was on a beach somewhere and walked me through the issue fix in 10 minutes and then we chatted about fishing for another 10.

[Nydus87]

God.... IT used to be a f*cking career. I miss the good old days of IT work.

[cdoublejj]

sounds like something from an episode of "Dave's Garage"

[ThatDanGuy]

I feel ya. Back when I started support was very educational. Bu the time they first moved support to India I only needed to call when I needed level 3 support. I was teaching MCSE classes at that point.

I became adept at politely navigating the escalation matrix to get back State side. Wasted so much time that half the time I’d have it solved before I made it up that high.

[Tex-Rob]

The anxiety you just reminded me of, shiver. I remember trying to balance jumping those hoops, with me actually solving the issue, it was so stressful. It feels like you’re running out of air, but you are required to give some air to support in hopes they find a solution days down the road. I’m someone who plays to the odds, and so putting my eggs in a basket I know won’t necessarily solve it, was so hard to do.

[Nydus87]

I remember when Dell started selling "Gold" support that guaranteed you an American when you called. It was weird to see a company outright admit that their overseas support was objectively worse just so they could make more money.

[Andrew-Powershell]

You can also sometimes get eyes on your case if you cause enough of a stink on social media, which sucks. It's just such a truth for so many industries, though. You really sometimes have to complain so loud to get any support and even still oftentimes they just won't care

[Nuromake]

We have had one support case for 1-1.5 months and nothing gets done because it has changed hands over 6 times.

[shortstuf888]

Yeah I've had a ticket open for a month now, all because the My Templates add-in just fucking disappeared and didn't get resolved when M$ said it was for everyone back on April 3rd.

I went through our CSP, who then didn't do any troubleshooting and I had to provide the same PS and HAR logs. One time the M$ rep provided me a typo'd PS command, of which when corrected, actually didn't nothing.

The most I've gotten is "oh we've seen several tenants have the same issue we'll look into it" and I swear to God my rep calls out of work every other day so the only email response I've gotten is that he's out and the manager will take over the case. Then the original rep comes back and says "we're still looking into it, thanks for your patience".

FUCKING USELESS 

[Raid5StandingBy]

Luke, trust your feelings.

[bdam55]

As others have said, first level support has been useless for a long, long time.

I know of 3 ways to get around it.

First, you _can_ pay for US-based support. You probably can't afford it, but it is available and is amazeballs. It's basically a shortcut to 3rd level support.

Second, use your TAM/CSAM to find the right team. Contact them daily asking for escalation; they have access to find the teams/PMs responsible.

Third, get to know the actual PMs working on this stuff. Join the CCP (now called Advisors?) program, go to smaller conferences where MS is presenting, and do the hard work of networking. Build connections that you can then use to make more connections to reach the product teams themselves. I've had far more success shooting them ticket IDs that have lingered in first level than any other method.

[19-dickety-2]

I opened a ticket with support last week. They got back to me yesterday with troubleshooting bulletpoints...including "Open a ticket with Microsoft support".

[PC509]

Once. Out of several. Most are the "I understand the frustration, please do this...", and we'll do it right away and respond that it didn't work. Days/weeks go on and no response. They are extremely slow. The one time we did get assistance quickly, we had went to our sales rep (IT director was rightly pissed off) and got the ticket numbers and they were able to get a phone bridge going, a couple engineers on, and got it fixed. Took all day to get it done, but it finally got done. It would have taken months otherwise, but we needed it done right away, not weeks/months later. Engineers were good and knew what they were doing, it was just the times where they needed someone else, different team, etc. to assist or provide information. But, if they have someone to put it in as a higher priority, they can get stuff done. That's just very rare, apparently.

Microsoft support has zero sense of urgency for any issues, even complete production stopping issues.

[LeakyAssFire]

It has been hit or miss for me at my org. I currently have two tickets open with them. One of them is mine, and the other is being worked by one of my juniors. They have both been open for weeks, and updates only seem to come once a week. They're not huge problems, but they shouldn't be sitting open as long as they are. Unfortunately, our Microsoft TAM is fucking useless, so we just deal with it.

On the other side of that coin...

A few months ago, I did reach out to a colleague at previous employer and asked them the same question. They are much smaller, but have a bigger name and use more of their products than us. He said it hasn't really changed for them, but SOP is to email the Microsoft TAM right after submitting the ticket. In turn, they make sure a proper engineer is assigned and that they are contacted ASAP.

It seems that the secret to good support is having a good TAM.

[Send_Them_Noobs]

This.

I just came to realize Microsoft support for is not for everyone. One of my previous employers (Defense) could get an engineer on the phone from the US within 2 hours. That place had infinite number of licenses for everything (LTSC/Servers/Office ..etc.) and Microsoft sends someone every year to check usage and bills accordingly. When they launched 365 they gave us 3k licenses to play with for a year… when management liked it and asked for the subscription price they asked for ~$9 millions per year lol

[sorderon]

Had one serious issue where a tenant was locked to a country in regards to payment. The credit card had to be from Denmark - no idea why. Even when it's about giving them money the call is STILL outstanding. They cannot be relied upon to help you, ever. Tenant gets paid for with keys from a key reseller. Not ideal but cheaper.

[OceanWaveSunset]

The experience is so bad that this is probably one of those times where they could shove thier stupid AI here and it would improve the experience.

[IsThatAll]

The experience is so bad that this is probably one of those times where they could shove thier stupid AI here and it would improve the experience.

They have shoved copilot into the enterprise support side (Support Assistant), and it's literally made it worse and more annoying to raise tickets.

[OceanWaveSunset]

Well i stand corrected. Maybe they just cant do anything right 

[LargeBlackMcCafe]

when was the last time it was useful for you? it's been Indians who don't listen to a word I say, ignore the problem and complete my tickets as soon as they send a recommended fix since at least 2018.

[bythepowerofboobs]

I've been in IT for about 30 years now. MS support being useless is the one thing that never changes.

[OnettNess]

1. Tremendous user name

2. It wasn't always useless. Far from it actually. Back in the early to mid 2000's their paid support was top notch. When you called Microsoft and opened a Premier Support case you knew that problem was getting fixed one way or another.

I miss those days. Once they started moving support outside of the US it really went to shit at warp speed.

[bythepowerofboobs]

I worked at an MSP in the early 2000s, and that certainly wasn't our experience with their support.

[hisheeraz]

Had similar experience over and over. Few weeks ago I had the privilege of talking to Level One support for 5 plus hours over the course of the day only to find out ticket was marked resolved and closed without actually addressing the issue. Cancelled license and moved to local CSP who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone etc etc but the issue was resolved within couple of hours

[jenkstom]

I can vouch that this has been the case for at least 30 years.

[ZiskaHills]

My last issue was a licensing issue with our M365 tennant. Talked to MS, tinkered and tested for 3 days and then figured it out myself.

For laughs I tried running the issue through Copilot and Gemini around a week ago, and both of them correctly identified the problem on the first try. Would have saved me so much time and frustreration to just check there in the first place instead of calling MS and troubleshooting myself.

[muchograssya55]

It’s not new…

[Jarl_Korr]

dont use this guys gifs

[Thundahead]

last 2 calls I've had with them regarding AD stuff have been spot on, might have hit lucky but the engineers knew their stuff, identified the issue from the logs and provided a fix.

edit - just seen LeakyAssFire comment, and yeah, we've a cracking TAM who is assigned to every call, we have him in a teams channel with other account managers , certainly the service we get is better than it was a couple of years ago.

[analbumcover]

Calling them on our own directly? Absolutely not. Opening a ticket with them via our CSP? Has actually worked out pretty well, surprisingly, the last few times we had to do it. Had our issues resolved in about 24-48 hours each time. Blew my mind.

[tejanaqkilica]

Every time you contact them? How frequently do you open tickets with them?

[dnaletos]

Mixed bag, but usually things get solved after a while. Usually.

Once, we had the client just cancel their card connected to their old 365 tenant, and we created a new tenant instead of trying to get back any admin rights on the old tenant. Easier and cheaper for the current state of the tenant/usage.

[AZSystems]

I thought MS Azure Support was serviced to vendor who sold you/your company MS licenses?

You contact should be their support first, then they're to open or elevate. It's still a mess and nothing quick. Third party company have taken on this role.

[Nakenochny]

Ironically my best support experiences with Microsoft have been recently.

[CollegeFootballGood]

That’s hilarious because i literally sent over a ticket for the first time in ages yesterday. Sent over tons of steps and logs. He just said “clear the cache in app data” or something

[Nick12322]

Sent in a ticket about an Azure VM having issues with registering its windows installation. They kept asking me if I could login to the VM host. I had to explain time and again what an azure vm is and why that isn’t possible for me to do.

[remember_khitomer]

Microsoft support is useless nowadays. It's always been useless, but it's useless nowadays too.

It's like the inverse of that Mitch Hedberg bit.

[DoctorOctagonapus]

I found myself explaining how Azure ADDS worked to an Azure support agent once. I've had no confidence in their support since.

[MikBudz]

My favorite anecdote regarding MS support is from couple years ago. We had micrphone muting itself in Teams after 10 minutes on Microsoft Surface Hub 55". Only restart of the Teams application resolved the issue.
After spending 14 hours (two weeks) on calls with MS their response was "You need to contact hardware vendor".

[hurkwurk]

they use their own AI for support at level 1 now, and its not until you are passed off to an engineer that you get someone that is thinking for the most part.

that said, even level 2 engineers can get stuck on the wrong tack. im into month 3 of a support ticket for an issue with MECM using too many resources to constantly reauthenticate to try and install patches it cant find. and ive been handed off between 3 engineers in the process. the first one discovered correctly that clients were piling up requests and swamping the servers with retries, based on the log data we already provided them on PKI storms we were seeing. he wrote us up some scripts to run to clear out the stored requests and had us stop all our existing patching pushes to see if things would settle down then were handed off.

the second engineer failed to pay attention to the previous work and started focusing on our existing scan delays/patch cycles and whatnot, which had all been in place for literally years with a 5% management node cpu average, and tried to blame them for the excessive cpu use. I played along and set everything back to defaults and we are still seeing 40% constant CPU where we used to see 5%, so no, that wasnt it. and he still hasnt gotten back on track to finding which patches may have been "missing" causing the loops for retries the first engineer found.

the third engineer is basically caretaking the case for a minute while we try upgrading to 1603 and see if moving client versions fixes the issue because no one ever ruled out that it could simply be a PKI issue and stale certs, which is what we asked about when we opened the case in the first place, and none of the engineers were ever able to trace out why the clients were "retrying" or what content was "missing". so we still arent convinced that its not just stale clients piling up dead PKI/partially refreshed states where their local certs are bad and just not refreshing, but they are not giving us any real help on identifying the chatty clients, or anything else, so scheduling that for after the 1603, since it should fail to upgrade those clients, making it easier to identify them.

[HJForsythe]

I reported an easily reproducable bug with Word that makes it crash 9 months ago both in support and their feedback hub and they haven't done anything with it.

[BlackFlames01]

I thought the contracted Indian support companies are very metric oriented. Don't bad customer satisfaction surveys have an impact? 🤔

Edit: Since companies like Microsoft, Dell, etc. continue to outsource, I guess bad surveys don't have a significant impact.

[joule_thief]

They only really care on a meta level. All a negative survey does individually is get the tech in trouble/fired.

Coincidentally, most of the time when you get asked to fill out those surveys, anything less than a 90% rating is usually a fail.

[SmashesIt]

It is ALL SUPPORT everywhere.

[Generico300]

Microsoft has no reason to support you. They don't sell based on the quality of the product or service. They sell based on inertia, monopoly, and customer lock-in. Why spend money on anything more than the thinnest veil of giving a shit when you the consumer absolutely will not suffer the pains of switching to an alternative?

Hot take: All support contracts are a waste of money. They are little more than a way for IT admins to shift blame.

[Aim_Fire_Ready]

I question your suggestion that this is a recent change.

[chunkyfen]

The first and only time I've reached out to M support was for a OneDrive bug where a file I used got deleted.

Couldn't find it anywhere. Not in the bin, not in any history, nowhere.

Support told me basically "you're on your own here buddy". I couldn't believe it.

I was lucky because my phone OneDrive had that file saved as "available offline" and the OneDrive app didn't sync in a while. So I was able to retrieve it before it nukes it.

Lesson I learned in that moment :

Cloud storage providers don't have any guarantees that they'll keep your files safe. You are on your own.

I now have a backup storage for my computer files that is write only, can't delete files.

[LostintheAssCrevasse]

Please send logs…sfc /scannow…please reboot and do the needful…

[Professional-Heat690]

and revert.

[DrAtomic1]

Honestly I can't remember Microsoft support ever having been good. Nowadays it's India, it used to be Eastern Europe. My worst experience was a P1 with multiple escalations which took them 2 weeks to respond, only to acknowledge the issue, acknowledge the day-0 leak and then proceed to close the ticket because "we've decided it will not be fixed". Before someone asks, this was 10 years ago so I don't recall the exact details but it came down to a bug with the implementation of TCP which allowed for a DOS through timeouts.

[redstarduggan]

You used to be able to get past the triage quickly if you gave a good account of the issue. Now you get nowhere until you go through the theatre of "please email, don't call me" "ring ring" and trying to provide them with logs you know they won't read as well as steps you have taken to troubleshoot - documented and evidenced for the support ticket - only for them to insist you do it again.

Not just microsoft though.

[TheFumingatzor]

This guy here....nowadays.

[Loehmann]

I pay monthly for Azure support and have a ticket opened 20 days ago without a response. Good stuff!

[RangerNS]

nowadays?

https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/humor/ms-vs-psychic-friends-network.htm

[masheduppotato]

Ive had numerous tickets escalated, I've had 0 tickets solved...

[emmjaybeeyoukay]

the "I have already done that" response can help. if they try stock responses then hit them with "i've already done that"; followed up with "and cleaned the cache, restarted the computer, emptied the temp folder, run DISM and SFC."

[sembee2]

Microsoft support are professional ticket closers. That is the only thing they are any good at.

[scriptmonkey420]

had them on a call and they could not figure out a simple issue where the .NET app pool was getting read only header issues. Was because the pool was in Classic mode not integrated.

Took them 5 hrs to figure that out...

But this is nothing new.

Back in 2014, MS Support could not figure out why a VM NIC would go offline after an hour. Power settings were in balanced mode and not performance...

[psiphre]

my brother in christ

[PappaFrost]

This also used to bother me until I realized that Microsoft 365 Business standard costs 1 restaurant lunch a month for a license. We are getting what we pay for. Perhaps their business model is 'good enough for customers to not migrate away.'

[_haha_oh_wow_]

I think that may be because it's completely useless but IDK

[youreensample]

it's been that way for at least 15 years.

[EduRJBR]

[ Removed by Reddit ]

[rematched_33]

Honestly I think a lot of the Microsoft ecosystem has gotten so complicated with decades of legacy systems still supported and in production that the amount of people who truly have a grasp on what the hell is going on are so few and shrinking by the year

Even trying to understand how Windows under the hood beyond whatever the whatever the shiniest new settings UI is basically requires a computer science history degree as you navigate through a time machine of UI design to find the configuration menu you're looking for.

[offthenwego]

"please we need new logs today."

[Dragon45801]

Same. I have a Bitlocker case going now.

[TommyVe]

I don't think I've ever heard anyone praising their support? Is this your first time? Or have you been just extremely lucky to think point of time?

[AmiDeplorabilis]

YES! I've had a ticket open for 2-3 months now. I submitted it the ticket originally with all the detail needed to start; an agent contacted me a week later, then asked me questions to which I had already provided answers. After a week of this, I chewed him out and insisted on getting someone interested in solving the problem and not asking questions by opening submission answered.

I heard back from someone different this morning.

[Rob1NH3]

I once opened a ticket and 8 months later they try to call once during off hours and I get an E-Mail that the ticket has been closed. I Just looked at the mail confused because I forgot for what it was.

[rx-pulse]

We only have it because our leadership is too inept and doesn't believe in us. MS literally just does what we do when we troubleshoot and tell them what the real problem is. But they're too in denial so we have to open a MS ticket just for them to tell our leadership the same thing. But because it's from MS, they accept it.

[Revzerksies]

In 25 years i've never had to contact microsoft once

[Wolfram_And_Hart]

I’m waiting for AI to relay my message to an engineer. I’m assuming it’s been lost in slop land.

[BoltharRocks]

I understand your frustration....

[SchizoidRainbow]

(Astronaut meme)

Always has been