Monday, 8:40 a.m. The sales manager can't get into Teams ahead of a client meeting. She opens a ticket, gets an automated email and waits. At 11:00 someone asks her to restart her laptop. At 2:00 p.m. she's told it's a Microsoft problem. There was no incident posted on the service health dashboard that morning, though. The culprit was a Conditional Access policy someone misconfigured on Friday.
Companies looking for a Microsoft help desk in Chile usually start by asking about the price per user. Fair enough, but first it helps to know which cases that help desk will actually solve, who solves them and how you'll find out whether it's doing a good job. An outsourced help desk that logs tickets and forwards them somewhere else is closer to an answering service than to Microsoft 365 support.
Below: how to split Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3, what to cover in Microsoft 365, Teams and Intune, which metrics to ask for and what permissions to give the provider.
Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3: who handles what
Tiers exist so each case reaches someone who can close it, without going through four people first. Providers name them differently. What matters is what each tier can do with the permissions it has.
| Tier | What it handles | Microsoft 365 examples |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Requests and known issues, with scripts and a knowledge base | Password resets, MFA unblocks, creating a shared mailbox, installing Office, Teams how-to questions |
| Tier 2 | Diagnosis and configuration inside the tenant | Mail flow rules, SharePoint permissions, Teams policies, noncompliant devices in Intune, wrongly assigned licenses |
| Tier 3 | Architecture, root cause and cases with Microsoft | Conditional Access, migrations, integrations with in-house systems, incidents that need a support case with Microsoft |
When you read a proposal, look at how many cases the provider expects Tier 1 to close. If everything gets escalated, Tier 1 is just a front desk. If nothing does, Tier 1 is probably changing settings it shouldn't touch.
Ask how escalation works, too. Does the ticket move to the next tier with complete notes, or does the user have to explain the problem all over again? That second explanation is what annoys users most, and almost no report measures it.
What Microsoft 365 support should cover
Every company uses Microsoft 365 its own way, but there's a core that nearly any help desk should handle.
Identity and access covers new and departing users, passwords, MFA methods and sign-in blocks. In many companies this is most of the volume, and it's also where one mistake opens a door that should stay shut.
Email and collaboration means Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive: shared mailboxes, distribution lists, site permissions, meeting recordings and file sync.
Devices mean Intune: enrolling laptops and phones, compliance policies, app deployment and remote actions such as locking or wiping a lost device. If you want the help desk to take remote control of devices, Intune Remote Help works on Windows, macOS and Android. It isn't turned on by default, and according to Microsoft's planning guide it needs a Remote Help license for both helpers and users, on top of Intune Plan 1 or Plan 2. Check whether your plan already includes it before you budget for it.
Then there's the relationship with Microsoft. The service health dashboard in the admin center separates incidents (a service or a major feature is unavailable) from advisories (some users are affected and there's often a workaround). A good help desk checks it before diagnosing anything, tells users when the outage is on Microsoft's side and uses the report-an-issue option when nothing has been posted. It should also know when to open a support case with Microsoft and follow it through.
Metrics: what to measure and what to skip
Outsourced help desk metrics are easy to inflate. Ask for a few, clearly defined ones. Nobody reads a dashboard with thirty indicators.
- Response time and resolution time, measured separately and by severity. A fast response is worthless if resolution takes days.
- First contact resolution: the share of cases closed without escalating or calling the user back. Ask for it to be measured only on the case types Tier 1 is meant to solve; mixing in project work skews it.
- Reopened tickets. If a closed case comes back a few days later, it wasn't solved.
- User satisfaction from a short survey when the ticket closes. Read the comments, not just the average.
- Recurring cases with a root cause. Ten "Outlook isn't syncing" tickets in a month are one problem someone needs to manage, not ten separate cases.
Don't use the number of closed tickets as your headline metric. A help desk that fixes root causes should close fewer tickets over time, not more.
How to write these commitments into the contract (severity levels, coverage hours, service credits) is covered in Managed IT services SLA: what to demand and how to read it.
Access: your provider doesn't need to be Global Admin
To support Microsoft 365, the provider needs permissions in your tenant. How you hand them over says a lot about how they work.
If the provider is a Microsoft partner, the current mechanism is granular delegated admin privileges (GDAP). With GDAP you explicitly approve which roles the partner gets, and access has an end date. According to Microsoft's FAQ, a GDAP relationship lasts two years at most and can auto-extend in six-month periods, but auto-extend isn't available when the relationship includes the Global Administrator role.
In practice:
- Tier 1 works with narrow roles such as Helpdesk Administrator.
- Higher-privilege roles go to few people, for a set period.
- The list of delegated roles is written into the contract, and you review it at least once a year.
- When the service ends, the GDAP relationship is closed that same day.
If the provider asks for a shared Global Admin account "to keep things simple," you already know how they'll look after your tenant.
There's one more thing that matters in Chile: the help desk sees email, files and data about employees and customers. Law 21.719 takes effect on December 1, 2026, and a provider with access to that data acts as a data processor, under a contract that has to set out the purpose, the types of data and what happens to them when the service ends.
Getting started without losing the first month
The first month shows whether the help desk is going to work. Before the SLA starts running with penalties, ask for:
- A tenant assessment: licenses, policies, devices, current admins and the most common cases of recent months.
- A starter knowledge base with the 15 or 20 cases that come up most at your company, written for your systems.
- A service catalog that says what's requested through a form, what needs approval and what's out of scope.
- One clear channel for users (portal, email or Teams) with support hours that match how you operate.
If you're still comparing providers, IT services company in Chile: how to choose has a list of questions for the proposal stage.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 on a help desk?
Tier 1 handles requests and known issues with defined scripts. Tier 2 diagnoses and changes settings inside the tenant. Tier 3 deals with architecture, root cause and the cases that need escalating to Microsoft.
Which help desk metric should I check first?
First contact resolution together with reopened tickets. Side by side, they show whether cases are really getting fixed or just changing status in the tool.
Do I have to give my Microsoft 365 support provider Global Admin?
No. Give narrow roles through GDAP, time-limited and approved by you, and keep high-privilege roles for specific cases and set periods.
Let's talk
At Disrupsoft we offer managed services with response and resolution SLAs, a service catalog, monthly KPIs and 9x5 or 24x7 coverage, handling incidents and requests. If you're setting up or reviewing your company's help desk, we'll show you how we work and what times we commit to.
