If you made the move to Office 365 and managed the migration yourself, what do you do when you have a question or problem? In this article, I’ll give you a few pointers from what I’ve learned over the last few years of using O365 for myself and clients.
Anyone with an O365 license gets technical support from Microsoft – did you know that? You have to be the administrator of your account/tenant if you want to speak or email someone. If you are an end user, you can use the community forums available to everyone.
Ways to Contact O365 Help
Get a Phone Call From Microsoft
From your Admin center, there is a Help icon in the lower right of the screen. Click on it and it brings up a box that’s pre-filled with the admin phone number and your expected wait time – nice. Add a note about what your problem is and sit back and wait for your call. When I first started doing O365 support, there were several times I contacted support via phone. Support for my level of O365 is out of India. Many people don’t want to deal with out-of-the-country support and I must say I’m in that
camp. Not because they aren’t knowledgeable, it’s mainly the language (or really accent) barrier that makes it tough.
First, there is the authentication process, which is a bit tedious. Next, there is the explanation process. Depending on your problem, it can take some time to explain what has happened and any fixes you might have tried already.
The techs I’ve spoken with were always extremely polite and gracious. Almost overly polite – I think perhaps is their culture or the training they get, I’m not sure, but they use quite a few words to thank me for my patience and time. More than once.
O365 Techs Can Log Into Your Computer
I really like that they can look at my computer screen. Of course, there is an approval and then authentication before this happens (more time). When they do log in, they actually didn’t do any of the typing/fixing, they could point out what and where, but I would do the actual typing.
Pro Tip – after you explain your problem, ask them right away to log into your computer – this will save time.
Once you get to where they can actually see the problem, you are well on your way to resolving your problem.
Follow-Up
After all my phone calls, the tech would follow-up with an email to make sure my problem was resolved. Be sure you save all your emails from the O365 tech support! When you have their email, they often include not only their contact information, but one or two other supervisor-level email and contact information that could be handy later.
Why do you want to hang on to this contact information? Big Pro Tip – because now that you have it, you can email the tech when you have questions later on! It can be on the same subject or something totally different.
Save Time – Email O365 Support
Since you have your tech’s email, email him/her next time a problem comes up and ask for a script for the problem you’re having. The techs have scripts they access on-line to help customers. They don’t know all the answers and of course, they have to give consistent answers to questions – right? I figured this out, after several painfully long sessions.
I tried it out (asking for a script), and it worked perfectly! Saved me a lot of time!
Search Community Forums
When you’re on just about any page from within O365, you’ll see a Help (question mark) icon on every page. Clicking that will give you several choices. Community has a lot of great information in it, but can be a real time suck looking through all the questions and answers. First you have to realize that not every problem is exactly like yours. Problems can appear to be the same, but because of your particular set-up (be it Office 365 plan, version of Office you have, your OS, etc.), the answer that fixed one person’s problem may not fix yours. So be aware of that.
Another tip – look at the credentials of who has answered the question. It could be anyone! Make sure it’s someone trustworthy.
If you’re not in the O365 back-end, searching for answers right from Bing or Google works well and will give you links into the forums.
Microsoft O365 Help Videos & Resources
With O365 maturing, Microsoft is churning out many cheat sheets, videos and tools to help users solve problems. Here’s a link to some helpful videos.
There’s the Office 365 Blog, with helpful information and news.
Here’s a troubleshooting site that functions like a wizard.
There are many 3rd party sites and tools. I like O365 Ninjah. They have great, free resources including videos, blog posts, daily tips and their flagship free, ultimate guide to Office 365.
I hope that helps give you a few tips into solving your own Office 365 problems.