When I worked in a Canadian call center acting as an outsourcer for Microsoft tech support , tier 1 was the entrylevel position , high school grads making minimum wage . Being able to quickly and efficiently handle calls with skill and knowledge would put you in the running for a promotion to tier 2 sooner or later . No customer ever talked to tier 3 unless tier 3 asked to talk to them . No customer was ever transferred to tier 3 another center altogether unless tier 3 documented their account with explicit instructions to call up t 3 . There was only one customeraccessible support tier higher than tier 3 , and that was NOC the regional network operations centers , basically the command room in each of the server farms . In over two years at the center , I handled precisely one customer who had an account issue so screwy he was calling in to talk to tier 3 who were coordinating with NOC . Meanwhile , most tier 1 agents quit within six weeks .