I found the Azure reps to be completely useless for any of the actual problems.
I worked for couple of really big enterprises, one of which had such a high commitment that Azure sent two engineers to sit with the teams working on their cloud. Highest level Enterprise support .. and yet for actual non-obvious problems it took them a month to reply with: can't help you with this, you must be doing it wrong.
This was techsupport tho, I'm sure the billing for multi-million commitments was just fine and dandy including wining and dining.
One other company was a big AWS user (and some Office365 so there were Azure pitches too) and GCP tried to get in with the business as well. When we went to their offices the level of patronizing smug that came from their reps was astonishing, so off-putting that I refused all further interaction with them as I wanted to barf.
I worked for one of Azure's biggest customers and our account management teams were fantastic. A few individuals were some of my favorite people I've worked with. That's where all the talent in the Azure support org goes- promoted to the biggest contracts.
Yes the big fish get attention and the small fish get ignored. Welcome to the B2B universe. If you're a small business relative to the scope of your counterparty, you generally won't get good service or have any leverage.
Seek out resellers or providers who are closer to yourself in size. You want it to hurt a bit if they lose your business. Of course you can go too far the other way as well, if you're a large client of a small company you'll probably get good service but they will be living parasitically off of you which isn't healthy and they may not be able to respond quickly enough if your needs grow.
I see this for actual service providers that have full control over their business, but if you have resellers of similar size as your own org, don't you end up with the problem that they are about as important for the big provider as you are and you are as screwed as before when things go wrong?
You comment reminded me of what my dad said about service contracts from IBM back in the 1970's. They promise they'll get a tech on site in 24 hours. They don't promise he'll know how to do anything.
I worked for couple of really big enterprises, one of which had such a high commitment that Azure sent two engineers to sit with the teams working on their cloud. Highest level Enterprise support .. and yet for actual non-obvious problems it took them a month to reply with: can't help you with this, you must be doing it wrong.
This was techsupport tho, I'm sure the billing for multi-million commitments was just fine and dandy including wining and dining.
One other company was a big AWS user (and some Office365 so there were Azure pitches too) and GCP tried to get in with the business as well. When we went to their offices the level of patronizing smug that came from their reps was astonishing, so off-putting that I refused all further interaction with them as I wanted to barf.