Microsoft realigns customer service group

Microsoft Corp. Tuesday announced a realignment of its customer service operations in an effort to provide a better, more streamlined experience for those calling into global contact centers.

As part of the changes, Microsoft has formed the Customer Service and Support organization by merging its Product Support Services group and its Customer Support group, said Todd Parsons, general manager of customer service at Microsoft. The company also is in the process of streamlining its management and IT infrastructure for all of its global contact centers across the world, he said. The company has about 75 such centers.

The internal organizational changes are now complete, a process that took about two years, Parsons said. The company is about 75 percent of the way through standardizing the core business processes and IT systems for customer service, he said.

Previously, each country in each region — North America; Latin America; Europe, Middle East and Africa; Japan; and Asia-Pacific and greater China — had their own IT systems and managed customer service centers separately, he said. Now, all customer service agents are in the process of learning one IT system, as well as standardized information about Microsoft products and policies so they can provide answers to a range of questions that might come into the contact centers.

One significant change to the IT system is it allows agents to store information about customer calls so that information can be accessed if someone calls again for support or service, Parsons said. The system is an implementation of Microsoft’s own Contact Center Framework, which leverages Microsoft software to provide a unified desktop for agents to access all the applications they need to help customers. The company also is integrating its online support into this new system, he added.

Previously, Microsoft did not keep track of specific customer needs when they called, so a customer might have to explain a problem over and over again every time he or she called, Parsons said.

Robert L Bagamery, a system support engineer for Canadian utility company Manitoba Hydro, said he is skeptical that any changes Microsoft makes to its customer support operations will replace what he feels is the best customer service experience — asking a person employed as a Microsoft technology specialist to help you with your problem.

“A co-worker or consultant is going to work much tighter with you to get a problem resolved than someone on the end of a telephone line a couple of thousand miles long,” he said via an e-mail Tuesday. “There is a much better dynamic when ‘working personal’ for investigating problems, and finding solutions.”

Microsoft also is in the process of rolling out support telephone numbers in each country that will be based on customer segments, such as one for IT professionals, one for developers, one for consumers etcetera, he said. Currently, Microsoft could have three numbers a partner might need to call in one country to address needs such as presales technical support, break/fix technical support or support for registering as a partner. In the future, the company hopes to give each customer segment one number for addressing all of their needs in each country, Parsons said.

To complete the deployment of the new system and processes, Microsoft plans to use data it gathers from logging customer interactions to figure out how best to segment customers and provide information to agents to help them, he said.