Overview

With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the mission of the Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers achieve their business outcomes faster with technology that does more.

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.

Advocacy and Customer Trust (ACT) 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.

In the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization we are looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success. As a Senior Support Escalation Manager, you will be the primary contact managing escalated customer and partner issues. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, hone your problem-solving, collaboration and orchestration skills, and deepen your relationship management expertise.

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.

Responsibilities

• Customer Resolution: Act as an internal expert to resolve longer-running, sensitive, or escalated issues and identify and build relationships with internal and external teams to resolve customer issues.
• Lead strategic projects and provide informal coaching and mentorship to less experienced Support Escalation Managers and coordinate resources and establish relationships to remediate future issues.
• Collaboration: Leverage relationships to remove roadblocks and develop written protocols for issue resolution.
• Identify reoccurring roadblocks and escalate as needed and manage escalated issues and ensure existing processes don’t hinder resolution.
• Communication: Manage customer and field expectations around issue response and keep stakeholders informed on issue response and resolution and build strategic relationships with internal teams and partners.
• Process Improvement: Surface feedback and identify systematic issues and lead process improvement efforts and review retrospective summaries and resolve recurring or sensitive issues.
• Vendor Relationships: Own and lead relationships with outsource vendors.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of technology industry, customer service, or related experience

OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 6+ years of technology industry, customer service, or related experience

o OR Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 4+ years of technology industry, customer service, or related experience

o OR equivalent experience

• Prior Incident and escalation management experience

• Proficient in C-level stakeholder management

Additional or Preferred Qualifications:

• Project management experience.

• Experience working with Microsoft products and services.

• Cloud Technology Certification (Azure Fundamentals. M365 Fundamentals)

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 behavioural4 changes.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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.