As a paying Power BI Pro customer I can't get technical support

[aront]

As a paying Power BI Pro via Office 365 customer I can't get support. I can't believe no one else has run into this problem before!

1. When I click on support from the Power Bi portal and choose Pro support, it asks you to sign in, but only accepts a Microsoft Liveid login. Since this is not associated with our Office 365 account, when I try to get support it asks me to pay

2. Opening a support ticket on the Office 365 site gets me to the very helpful tech support people there who are not experts in Power BI. They suggest I try the phone number

3. When I call and go through screening and then get transferred over to Power BI support I get this recording which sounds like a slo mo dying robot and then I get disconnected

This is an absolutely ridiculous situation!!!!! Point 1 just drives me crazy in general - Microsoft, you guys need to somehow integrate LiveID and Office 365 - understand this is not trivial, but it bites us customers in the butt over and over and over...

[jburchel]

Hi aront,

I hope we can help you resolve your issue quickly and efficiently moving forward despite the frustration you faced before.  You are welcome to submit a Basic support ticket anytime and one of our team will follow up with you by that route too.  If your administrator configures your tenant accordingly, then your work email can be associated with your Office 365 login so you can login and submit a Pro ticket even without logging in with your LiveID.  However, our team will help you even with a Basic support ticket, so we can help resolve whatever issue you are facing. 

Thank you, and I hope we can have you using Power BI successfully in your enterprise soon!

Jon

[aront]

First as noted above I already contacted Pro support via the phone and they are in touch with me. Also as noted above I did contact your basic support via this site but 1) it is email only and takes more time so it's not the best solution and 2) when he did respond he told me that he checked our account and we are due Pro and I should use that. 

As for your suggestion our O365 admin should configure the portal, I am the admin and as I noted several times in this thread after talking with O365 tech support there is currently NO WAY to configure a Business Essential O365 tenant with the capability of submitting a service request.

Basically this thread is about Microsoft needing to fix THAT problem. My underlying issue is currently being discussed with Pro support.

Thanks and have a great holiday 🙂

[aront]

Someone in Power Bi support contacted me so hopefully the issue will be resolved. In terms of this specific issue he pointed me to this article which hopefully will help some of you:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/powerbisupport/archive/2015/06/19/why-can-t-i-submit-a-power-bi-support-r...

However, as Power Bi for Office 365 is NOT an option in Business Essentials there is workaround is not available and once again we are left with the sad result that Business Essential Power BI Pro customers can NOT open a service request.

Another thing he pointed out is that there are service issues with the Power BI portal that might be the cause of my issue. Two things to keep in mind here:

1. While I can tell my customers "feature x" is on the way since Microsoft has delivered over the past few months on missing features, having a severe service issue hang around for over a week is a barrier for consulting companies pushing Power BI adoption

2. I asked the chat support about it at the very beginning and they couldnt/wouldn't help me and referred me to tech support. What this indicates is that Microsoft needs to add better internal communication with this front line support.

The reason I am relentlessly going on about this support issue is precisely because I believe Power BI is a great product and am hoping Microsoft will invest better support resources to make it a truly worthy product. Without that level of support excellence it will be hard to sell this product to our customers!

[aront]

So apparently the issue is the following.

As I mentioned in my previous response, I opened a ticket in the basic path. The tech support person there checked and he noted that I am eligible for Pro support and he referred me to this web page:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/powerbisupport/archive/2015/08/13/how-to-create-a-service-request-to-cont...

But when I went to my O365 tenant there was no option to create a service request! So I checked with the ever helpful O365 tech support and we figured out the following by comparing the two types of tenants:

1. The customer who we are doing this work for only has a Business Essential tenant not an Enterprise tenant.

2. The former is not set up to open service request, perhaps because before Power BI there were no service type products you could add to a Business Essential protal (Dynamic CRM apparently requires Enterprise).

3. The upshot is there is no way to open a service request for Power BI Pro on O365 unless you have an Enterprise tenancy!!!!!

This is a huge and exceedintly annoying screw up on Microsoft's part because that means that the only way people in this situation have to contact Power BI Pro support is by phone, which is nearly impossible. 3 tries and a lot of wasted time yesterday failed. Only with the help of the O365 support person and an hour on the phone did we manage to open a ticket. Unfortunately the ticket was routed to the wrong place, so I'm still not sure if and when I will get help. 

Meanwhile I am opening a suggestion on this in the Feedback section 🙂

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi/suggestions/11140647-allow-people-with-power-bi-pro...

[MiguelMartinez]

@aront if you are a Power BI for Office 365 customer, you should get technical support thourgh your Office admin portal. Having said that, Power BI for Office 365 will soon be deprecated for the new Power BI service which GAed on July. Your license should be transfered. You should be able to find more info on the same article.

[aront]

Miguel, thanks for your response. However it is not relevant to my problem.

I am not a Power BI for Office 365 customer. I am a Power BI pro customer. You can only get Power Bi support from this website if you have a Microsoft premium service contract. If you follow the link I give above you see that Power BI Pro customers also have to get support via the Office 365 portal (not just those on the old license).  I was told the same thing by several support people at Microsoft. However, as I explain that is not possible currently for Customers that do not have E1 or above licenses for O365. I checked this with O365 tech support and they confirm what I am saying here. BTW 3 business days have passed since I opened a support ticket via phone and I still haven't heard back from Power BI support,

[MiguelMartinez]

Thanks fot the further info @aront Let me ask around here the best way to proceed. And thank for your patience.

[Greg_Deckler]

Have you tried the smiley icon in the upper right? I have always received a response to issues I have submitted in this way in a very timely fashion and they have been most helpful. I understand not probably exactly what you want, but I have resolved a number of issues this way working directly with people that are very knowledgable about Power BI.

[aront]

Thanks for the suggestion. I posted a basic ticket and a community forum posting, so hopefully I'll get an answer soon. But it really reflects poorly on Power Bi support that it's nearly impossible for Power BI Pro customers to get to them. I understand Microsoft is a huge organization but this is ridiculous. The support page here refers you to O365 to get support, but the O365 support team has no way of getting you in contact directly with Power BI. Even though every one I've spoken to there try to be very helpful, it's essentially a useless path to getting Power Bi support.