Area Support Lead

Overview

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft's products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft's portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

Within CE&S, the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization builds trust and confidence for every person and organization through delivering a seamless support experience. In CSS, we are powered by Microsoft's AI technology to help consumers, businesses, partners, and more, resolve their issues quickly and securely, helping prevent future problems from occurring and achieving more from their Microsoft investment.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

With over 18,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft's end-to-end customer experience. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers come to us not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, but also because we provide differentiated customer experience.

Advocacy & Customer Trust (ACT) delivers connected support experiences for our Unified customers to gain, maintain and sometime rebuild their trust. The Area Engagement Team leads education of our field teams, addresses reactive support challenges for Areas and individual customers and partners closely with our Customer Success teams, underpinned by a robust governance process to improve customer experience across each area.

As an Area Support Lead (ASL) you will own Crisis Communications for Small, Medium, Enterprise and Channel (SME&C) customers and partners in your region and liaise with our largest customers in this segment, acting as a trusted advisor and partner for your Regional SME&C Leadership (EVP/CVP/AVP/GM). You'll be the Commander and Technical Leader during a Service Incident or large scale event, co-ordinating key leaders and decision makers across our Support and Engineering Organisations. You'll have executive-facing communication skills to restore confidence, and partner with the customer's Account Team to prevent recurrences through the Customer Engagement Plan to improve and shape the support experience, acting with urgency to produce the best possible outcomes.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

Customer Resolution

• Required to be on-call during shifts, including after hours and weekends and available to take ownership of escalations to Senior Leaders, liaising between the customer and Senior Leaders across organizations within Microsoft.
• Acts as a subject matter expert on best practices to support the customer experience. Crafts and executes executive summaries and identifies patterns across customer issues. Creates strategies to resolve reoccurring or highly sensitive issues in partnership with Area, Support and Product Group leadership.
• Own Service Incident or crisis response and management in the Area (before, during and after) - ensure understanding of Field roles and responsibilities. Accountable for ensuring the Region/Area is trained.
• Lead strategic projects designed to improve resolution times, customer satisfaction, and support experience. Provides examples and direction to prioritize efforts to prevent and reduce escalations/crises.

Customer Health

• Partner with CSU leadership to build and execute plans that improve customer health signals, including reactivity, major incident response plans, proactive recommendations and cloud resiliency.
• Sponsor key accounts in region in collaboration with Regional CSU leadership, building relationships and trust with our largest accounts and ensuring that their support experience exceeds expectations.
• Partner with account teams and Area Business Partner through contract renewals and assist in deal shaping, ensuing that customers have the right offerings to ensure their success.

Collaboration

• Leverages relationships across Regional CSU, Support and Product Groups to remove roadblocks. Establishes and oversees the development of written protocols to ensure customer issues are resolved. Identifies reoccurring roadblocks across the Area and escalates as needed.
• Owns escalated issues and manages Area/Region escalated customer crises to identify and remove barriers. Ensures existing processes are not a blocker to customer issue resolution and influences the direction of process improvement efforts with a global perspective. Acts as an expert and provides guidance to Support Escalation team members on how to handle moderate to highly complex cases.
• Support Area and regional leadership and collaborate with the Area Business Partner (ABP) to identify systematic issues and leads process improvement efforts to ensure continuous improvement. Recommend process improvements and support the feedback forums with identified actions.

Communication

• Identifies and builds strategic relationships with internal teams, partners, and communications with senior and executive leadership to resolve issues that are complex in scope.
• Leverages precision questioning techniques to understand the pain points of the customer experience during Crisis and then proactively addresses the People/Process/Technology blockers identified.
• Customer engagement - both reactive (emergency) and proactive (sponsorship). Confidence calls after outage. Involved in service incident (SI) aka outage Crisis and non-outage crisis for specific, strategic customers

Qualifications

• 11+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 6+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 4+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR equivalent experience.
• Crisis Management and C-Suite proven communication capabilities
• Cloud Technology Certification (Azure Fundamentals. M365 Fundamentals).

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• 16+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 9+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 8+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR equivalent experience.
• Project management experience.
• Experience working with Microsoft products and services.
• Knowledge and understanding of Unified Deal Construction and Support a plus

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.