Support Escalation Manager - Service Manager

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 a differentiated and connected customer experience.

The Global Customer Success (GCS) organization is leading the effort to create the desired customer experience through support offer creation, driving digital transformation across our tools, and delivering operational excellence across CE&S.

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 help customers and partners resolve their issues quickly, prevent future problems from occurring, and demonstrate new ways to achieve more from their Microsoft investment.

Connected Customer Support Experience delivers connected support experiences to our customers to gain and keep their trust.

Our Service Manager will be positioned and aligned with our customers as Chief Operating Officers within the account, strategically placed to ensure that we have the appropriate level of engagement to support and drive the customer’s reactive support landscape and improve operational health. As such you will work with some of the world’s largest companies, public sector depts and not for profit organisations pursuing strategic activities, utilising Microsoft technologies to modernise their business.  

We create an environment where you can do your best work and build a career both in the Service Manager role as well as the wider Microsoft. As your interests and goals evolve we will enable you to connect you with a diverse, thriving community that can help you grow.

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home.

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.

Customer Resolution

• Acts as an internal expert to resolve longer running, sensitive, or escalated issues
or acts as a primary contact for escalated issues on behalf of less experienced IC
levels. Identifies and builds relationships with various internal and external teams
and senior leaders to resolve customer issues. Leads strategic projects. Informally
provides coaching, mentorship, or support to less experienced Support Escalation
Managers to resolve customer issues.
• Leads inter-regions, cross-regions, cross-group, or account team unit (ATU)
initiatives by creating plans and managing relationships with other business units
to improve the customer support experience for a group of customers or a
specific region/area. Acts as a subject matter expert on best practices to support
the customer experience.
• Reviews status updates to customers and provides informal guidance to others
on communicating with internal stakeholders through various channels of
communication for highly sensitive or difficult issues.
• Leads strategic projects designed to improve resolution times, customer
satisfaction, and support experience.
• Proactively coordinates resources and establishes relationships to drive
opportunities within the team and across stakeholder groups in postmortem
discussions to remediate future issues.

Collaboration

• Leverages relationships across teams to remove roadblocks. Establishes and
oversees the development of written protocols to ensure customer issues are
resolved. Identifies reoccurring roadblocks across the team and escalates as
needed.
• Owns escalated issues and manages account-aligned customer incidents 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 informal
guidance to Support Escalation team members on how to handle moderate to
highly complex cases.

Communication

• Manages customer and field expectations around issue response and represents
the company independently. Ensures customer and MSFT internal stakeholders
stay informed on the response and resolution status of customer issues.
Communicates and influences internally to drive faster issue resolution.
• Identifies and builds strategic relationships with internal teams, partners, and
communications with senior leadership to resolve issues that are complex in
scope.

Process Improvement

• Surfaces feedback from the team and drives collaboration across functions to
identify systematic issues and leads process breakdowns to ensure
resolution/progress. Creates strategy for process improvements and leads project
or workgroup to improve internal processes.
• Reviews postmortem executive summaries and identifies patterns across
customer issues. Creates strategies to resolve reoccurring or highly sensitive
issues in partnership with leadership.
Vendor Relationships
• Owns and leads relationships with outsource vendor to resolve issues and foster
positive cultural and behavioral changes.

Other

Other

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