Office 365 Tech Support is Good!

As a technology professional, I dread calling tech support sometimes. Most of the time when you contact tech support (for any software), you get a front line person that is not terribly knowledgeable or useful. That first level person has access to a knowledgebase that is similar to what you could find by searching online. When that person can't help, they pass you up to a higher level of support that can likely fix your issue.

The other problem with most tech support is timeliness. You are often kept on hold for an extended period of time or are forced to contact support via email or web form and hope that they get back to you within a few hours. It's almost never quick.

My experience with Office 365 support today was amazing. I had a question on Sunday morning at about 11am and had an answer within 10 minutes. Here is what it looked like....

1. I'm working on some labs and find that in the Exchange admin center, when I attempt to create a distribution group it actually prompts me to create an Office 365 group instead. I confirm this is the case in my own personal Office 365 tenant and a test tenant I'm working with for lab development.
2. In the Office 365 admin center, in Support, I selected Let us call you. This option is not available until you at least attempt to search for a resolution to your problem.
3. The Let us call you option showed an estimated wait time of 10 minutes. So, I entered my phone number and waited.
4. Within about 5 minutes, I got a call from a very helpful person at Office 365 Support (thank you Bel).
5. She listened to my concern and did a remote view on my system to confirm the issue and identified it as a bug. She offered a work around of creating the distribution list in the Office 365 admin center (which does work) instead of the Exchange admin center.
6. She also followed up with an email that stated she confirmed the issue in her own test environment and has reported it as a bug in the Exchange admin center user interface. Nice to know that there is a process in place to take care this rather than just giving me the work around.

Here is what was awesome:

• Support was fast and I knew about how long it would take to be contacted. Sometimes the ambiguity of dealing tech support is the worst part. And, this was Sunday morning, not business hours.
• The support person wasn't working from a script. She listened to my issue and then wanted to confirm it by remote viewing. There wasn't a long process of "well, let's try this...." I was not treated like a dummy as most tech support does.
• This level of support is available to anyone. I don't have any special support contract. In fact the tenant for my email that I used to send the support request costs only about $12 per month. That's awesome support for a low cost product.

Update: Since this post, I've learned from Microsoft that the UI change for creating distribution groups in Exchange admin center is not a bug, but a design change. For details, see my other post here: http://byronwright.blogspot.ca/2017/01/o365-unable-to-create-distribution-group.html