Partner Centre Support - waste of time?

[Procradminator]

I've a very bitter taste in my mouth.

We are a silver partner and I have support incidents as one of the benefits. So, I raised a ticket on the partner centre when we had a client server down and I heard nothing for weeks. Not hours or days but weeks!

I have another ticket open as our status is in some sort of limbo and it's been there for over a week and nothing at all. No reply, update, contact or anything. If I call the Microsoft support number and choose the partner option I get a message saying open a ticket in the partner portal and then my call is cut.

If I'm championing, supporting and selling Microsoft's products and services I expect some sort of service level. Is that unreasonable and is anyone else seeing the same?

Anyone know how I can get a dialogue going because right now it seems like I'm urinating into the wind.

[JanoschUlmer]

@Procradminator : Sorry for getting this experience. Sometimes things go wrong because of the multiple options to raise a support tickets in different portals.

One thing that I did see in your description and caught my attention:

"So, I raised a ticket on the partner centre when we had a client server down and I heard nothing for weeks. "

If there is an issue with an on-premises server going down, open a a support ticket using https://support.microsoft.com/oas - you will then enter your AccessID/ Contract ID from the technical benefits (that you find in Partner Center) in this process. When it is about Cloud Services for customers that you manage as CSP, you could go via Partner Center-->Customer Management, but finally open the ticket via the respective admin portal in the customer tenant context, not directly within Partner Center. 

Partner Center support does not have a SLA, since there is only cost-free-support, and there are by definition no business critical issues, zero options to get product support in there for such a scenario. You can not even set a severity level when opening a ticket - different to the options I mentioned above

Reg. the MPN/CSP profile issue you mentioned it is indeed Partner Center support. And yes, unfortunately the response time is often a week currently.

Again, sorry for the experience, and of course it would be better to have the options all being integrated in one portal, or have more easier understandable routing options. Just wanted to mention this specific aspect that there is no support option within Partner Center for product problems/services outages.

[sbeckett]

"If I'm championing, supporting and selling Microsoft's products and services I expect some sort of service level. Is that unreasonable and is anyone else seeing the same?"

Given the current situation around the lack of any UK partner management, and the total silence related to people's very real concerns around NCE, it would seem that yes, it's unreasonable to expect anything in return for our championing of MS products. Apart from some incentives, which will simply go towards having to pay for the premium support to get any answers. 

Urinating into the wind basically describes how most silver partners seem to feel about their relationship with MS nowadays.

[JASA1976]

Its not just silver partners as we have multiple gold competencies and advanced specialisations, and we suffer the same relationship issues.

I don't think Microsoft support understands service levels, incidents, problems or anything remotely close to an ITIL or any other service management frame work.

[v-jillarmour]

Sorry to hear about your experience. What is your support ticket number and I can check to see it's still active. I am not support, so this is the extent of my powers in this area. 

[JStringer]

Hi, i am replying to your concerns as our Ops support team have had real delays when tickets raised with MS. We are a Gold Partner, and i feel your pain.

What your alternatives are:

1. Buy into Microsoft Advanced support contract (Cloud Only), not On-prem (total is $16,500 p/a), can be paid monthly
2. Buy into Premier support contract (Cloud & On-prem), which come bespoke (tailored to your requirements), these as a guideline are upwards $60,000 p/a

I realise you may not want to hear this but that is your best bet, we are going Premier after MS failing miserably on some recent support incidents. You are moving from an NHS waiting list into BUPA in essence. I’m afraid you will otherwise be waiting a long time to be heard, and frustrations will mount.

If you want to gain someone’s attention at MS, find some big hitters up the chain on LinkedIn, we did... and made some noise. We still ended up with the options above. Good luck!

Sent from Mail for Windows


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Jonathan Stringer
Relationship Manager

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[JASA1976]

Having had to purchase the Microsoft Advanced Support as a tier 1 CSP partner I can say that other than it being a requirement to be tier 1 a waste of money. You seem to end up with the same support teams with no real improvement in response times.

[JASA1976]

That's typical MS support experience. Do you have the advanced support for Partners? If you do you should have an account manager for support. Still about as much use, but about the only escalation path available.

Occasionally on here you might get an forum admin reach out.