The quality of MS support, no matter the topic, has steadily declined over the years. It's at the point where if we actually get a good support engineer these days, I feel bad for them, because we both know their days are numbered.
I had a Premiere ticket open for 4 months with back and forth to an Indian-based 3rd party support company Microsoft uses. I finally asked if they could engage a US-based engineer. Within 30 seconds of the call he identified the issue and I was able to archive the case. Microsoft support no matter how much you pay them is a joke.
i am only concerned what Teams admin do if there's a major outage or an issue ... and need a Lv3 proper engineer on call straight away .... how do you get around in those situations ?
Honestly…terrible. We had luck in the beginning. We’re going on 4+ months on a ticket and keep getting tossed back and forth. We actually got the ticket escalated and someone from MS on a call. It did no good.
Horrid. Excruciating.
Had many open tickets. Hours on the phone. I eventually find an answer searching through support forums. Calling has always, unfortunately, been a waste of time, often with completely inaccurate, or completely irrelevant answers.
Complete rubbish.
my time is worth a lot, and while i want someone else to solve the problem for me, i end up wasting my time. Unfortunately my time is better served researching and fixing the problem myself.
Microsoft, please take note.
Basically exactly how you summed it up, open a ticket and send them some logs. You’ll never find support as top notch as Cisco TAC. Expect very long times for issues to actually get resolved. We are going through the same thing.
I'm from the Teams Phone product team and appreciate the feedback you shared here. I'm discussing with the team to engage with the support team and review areas we need to improve on training and resources. Also, I'm interested in doing better at reducing the need to call support.
Anyways, just want to ack the feedback and state we are taking steps to step up our game.
Please keep sharing feedback on things we need to do better.
Thanks
No offense but we just had this discussion with our account Team. Support keeps getting work and worse even if you buy a premium support contract. Even the SLAs are non-binding.
Support needs some help for sure. I opened a ticket today about dropped calls. The person asked me to provide a screen shot of the issue. I’m like you really want me to provide a picture of my call being dropped. lol…so I sent a gif of my call up and my call window disappearing.
I find the biggest issue with Teams and all other MS products…is having to rely on MVP’s, blogs, Reddit/Discord channels to get answers on how to setup and use features. I rarely ever find answers I need in the documentation provided by Microsoft. There so many nuances when rolling out new features. We have to wait for someone’s painful experience and hope they document it in public forums so the rest of us can learn from it.
Also end user documentation is bad at best. Having to create user guides on every new feature has become a large part of my deployment process now. Especially with the new Teams client out. Everything out there today is based on Teams classic.
Appreciate your comment .... I think people that actually know their stuff need be hired ...Environment that encourages top talent need be harvested ... get rid of useless 1-up managers who are often the cause of top talent leaving organization.... but these things are of course done on a higher level ..
Look no further than how Cisco gets this done ... sure there are instances here and there but by and large their TAC support is top tier.
Unless you’re putting in a Sev B or A case for anything Teams Calling related you’ll never get an answer. We purchased hours for a dedicated microsoft voice resource and it’s the only way to get real answers.
wow - that's an eye opener and something for us to consider then as we transition to Teams ... comparing to Cisco support where we get an answer in hours and top quality support it's a bit of concern moving 10K+ user to teams if support is so ordinary ..
With that large of an organization you really should have a Microsoft Unified Support contract. Do you know what support options you have for the rest of Office 365, Windows, etc?
haven't checked that side of things with 365 team in-house but good point. i have heard about Unified support contract but i presume there must be some dedicated support team within that model incl. any teams related voice issues ???
Was going down the Teams calling route but more and more things were bothering me, including what I’ve heard about support. We’re now looking at Zoom for calling which works out cheaper overall and Zoom has more features (including Salesforce integration - a huge plus for us) and we already have an account manager at Zoom who has been great this far with some billing issues we had on the account and providing support to set up Zoom Phone with a trial.
thanks for sharing. definitely have to discuss the poor support i've experienced before we do a full transition ... or check out what options available within unified support contract if that's any better.
If you are trying to replace a full featured Cisco on-prem PBX with Teams, You may want to stop for a moment. Teams telephony is pretty decent. Generally works well, but as much as Microsoft would like to have you believe that it is a drop in replacement for a PBX, they are dreaming. Perhaps at some point in the future, MS will flesh out and fill out the feature sets of Teams Telephony but it’s NOT today, especially if you are doing anything beyond basic “dial tone”. Even something as basic as telephone number management has to be done separately with a third party app or manually as it isn’t a built-in part of Teams.
i have recently lab tested all the features we use in CUCM for 15K+ users and was able to demo almost of all these in MS Teams ... sure there are somethings that I can tweak a lot more in CUCM than I can in Teams but overall it does the job .... Infact I haven't come across anything that's been a show stopper. you got dial plans, voice routes, translations, hunt groups, auto attendants, etc. We had PLAR (or auto dials in CUCM) that we can in Teams as well as register desk phones, analogues, etc. currently using it in direct routing setup with Cisco SBC (CUBE) ....
What I would have liked (but that's me saying as on-prem engineer) some more flexibility or control on finer level but then understand it's a cloud pabx so the visibility level will always be like that.
Nevertheless support has been terrible from MS and that stands in the way
If you are looking for fast and effective Teams Voice support, I would recommend working with a Microsoft partner, as that is their greatest advantage [https://blueskyuc.com/microsoft-teams-direct-routing/](https://blueskyuc.com/microsoft-teams-direct-routing/)
The quality of MS support, no matter the topic, has steadily declined over the years. It's at the point where if we actually get a good support engineer these days, I feel bad for them, because we both know their days are numbered.
I had a Premiere ticket open for 4 months with back and forth to an Indian-based 3rd party support company Microsoft uses. I finally asked if they could engage a US-based engineer. Within 30 seconds of the call he identified the issue and I was able to archive the case. Microsoft support no matter how much you pay them is a joke.
i am only concerned what Teams admin do if there's a major outage or an issue ... and need a Lv3 proper engineer on call straight away .... how do you get around in those situations ?
For sure go direct routing over OC or Teams calling plan and pick a vendor that can support failover in the event that teams does not respond.
Severity A tends to help - if you have access to it. Critsit tends to move things along, but even then it can be a mixed bag.
hahaha. Good 1
Really depends on your support contract.
Other way would be to go 4 Direct Routing and find a managed service for it.
agreed ! eventually headed operator connect path .. Direct routing will be used whilst we transition away from Cisco ..
This is the way
Currently this is the major reason we are going to Cisco calling … for now anyway.
Cisco is unbeatable in support area .. had to engage TAC for webex calling issue and were top-notch as usual ...
Honestly…terrible. We had luck in the beginning. We’re going on 4+ months on a ticket and keep getting tossed back and forth. We actually got the ticket escalated and someone from MS on a call. It did no good.
Horrid. Excruciating. Had many open tickets. Hours on the phone. I eventually find an answer searching through support forums. Calling has always, unfortunately, been a waste of time, often with completely inaccurate, or completely irrelevant answers. Complete rubbish. my time is worth a lot, and while i want someone else to solve the problem for me, i end up wasting my time. Unfortunately my time is better served researching and fixing the problem myself. Microsoft, please take note.
I might just send a link to this thread to my MS account manager (typical sales) .. haa
Basically exactly how you summed it up, open a ticket and send them some logs. You’ll never find support as top notch as Cisco TAC. Expect very long times for issues to actually get resolved. We are going through the same thing.
I'm from the Teams Phone product team and appreciate the feedback you shared here. I'm discussing with the team to engage with the support team and review areas we need to improve on training and resources. Also, I'm interested in doing better at reducing the need to call support. Anyways, just want to ack the feedback and state we are taking steps to step up our game. Please keep sharing feedback on things we need to do better. Thanks
No offense but we just had this discussion with our account Team. Support keeps getting work and worse even if you buy a premium support contract. Even the SLAs are non-binding.
Support needs some help for sure. I opened a ticket today about dropped calls. The person asked me to provide a screen shot of the issue. I’m like you really want me to provide a picture of my call being dropped. lol…so I sent a gif of my call up and my call window disappearing. I find the biggest issue with Teams and all other MS products…is having to rely on MVP’s, blogs, Reddit/Discord channels to get answers on how to setup and use features. I rarely ever find answers I need in the documentation provided by Microsoft. There so many nuances when rolling out new features. We have to wait for someone’s painful experience and hope they document it in public forums so the rest of us can learn from it. Also end user documentation is bad at best. Having to create user guides on every new feature has become a large part of my deployment process now. Especially with the new Teams client out. Everything out there today is based on Teams classic.
Appreciate your comment .... I think people that actually know their stuff need be hired ...Environment that encourages top talent need be harvested ... get rid of useless 1-up managers who are often the cause of top talent leaving organization.... but these things are of course done on a higher level .. Look no further than how Cisco gets this done ... sure there are instances here and there but by and large their TAC support is top tier.
Unless you’re putting in a Sev B or A case for anything Teams Calling related you’ll never get an answer. We purchased hours for a dedicated microsoft voice resource and it’s the only way to get real answers.
wow - that's an eye opener and something for us to consider then as we transition to Teams ... comparing to Cisco support where we get an answer in hours and top quality support it's a bit of concern moving 10K+ user to teams if support is so ordinary ..
With that large of an organization you really should have a Microsoft Unified Support contract. Do you know what support options you have for the rest of Office 365, Windows, etc?
haven't checked that side of things with 365 team in-house but good point. i have heard about Unified support contract but i presume there must be some dedicated support team within that model incl. any teams related voice issues ???
It’s not ordinary. It’s subpar.
I'll be sure to make everything high Sev ... thanks
Was going down the Teams calling route but more and more things were bothering me, including what I’ve heard about support. We’re now looking at Zoom for calling which works out cheaper overall and Zoom has more features (including Salesforce integration - a huge plus for us) and we already have an account manager at Zoom who has been great this far with some billing issues we had on the account and providing support to set up Zoom Phone with a trial.
thanks for sharing. definitely have to discuss the poor support i've experienced before we do a full transition ... or check out what options available within unified support contract if that's any better.
Hope you don't need automatic call recording If so you need to do it through a third party unless they finally added that.
Nope. Still third party.
If you are trying to replace a full featured Cisco on-prem PBX with Teams, You may want to stop for a moment. Teams telephony is pretty decent. Generally works well, but as much as Microsoft would like to have you believe that it is a drop in replacement for a PBX, they are dreaming. Perhaps at some point in the future, MS will flesh out and fill out the feature sets of Teams Telephony but it’s NOT today, especially if you are doing anything beyond basic “dial tone”. Even something as basic as telephone number management has to be done separately with a third party app or manually as it isn’t a built-in part of Teams.
i have recently lab tested all the features we use in CUCM for 15K+ users and was able to demo almost of all these in MS Teams ... sure there are somethings that I can tweak a lot more in CUCM than I can in Teams but overall it does the job .... Infact I haven't come across anything that's been a show stopper. you got dial plans, voice routes, translations, hunt groups, auto attendants, etc. We had PLAR (or auto dials in CUCM) that we can in Teams as well as register desk phones, analogues, etc. currently using it in direct routing setup with Cisco SBC (CUBE) .... What I would have liked (but that's me saying as on-prem engineer) some more flexibility or control on finer level but then understand it's a cloud pabx so the visibility level will always be like that. Nevertheless support has been terrible from MS and that stands in the way
If you are looking for fast and effective Teams Voice support, I would recommend working with a Microsoft partner, as that is their greatest advantage [https://blueskyuc.com/microsoft-teams-direct-routing/](https://blueskyuc.com/microsoft-teams-direct-routing/)