Q&A: Guido Häring Offers a View Into Microsoft Customer Service and Support
One of the least well-known of Microsoft’s business units, Microsoft Customer Service and Support comprises an army of skilled support technicians capable of resolving the most challenging problems that Microsoft customers can come up with.
Düsseldorf, Germany, 25 July 2007 — One of the largest support networks in the industry, Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS) helps nearly 1 billion customers around the world each year. The organisation is responsible for providing the product groups with customer feedback, proactively improving customer’s IT infrastructure by carrying out regular risk assessment reviews and making sure customers are able to receive support in their local language wherever possible.
In Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Microsoft responds to 600,000 unique requests for technical support, fields 21 million phone calls and provides approximately 130 million customers with online technical information and real-time support.
These are big numbers. And yet, for playing such a key role at Microsoft, the group is one of the least well known. The EMEA Press Centre spoke with Guido Häring, general manager of CSS for EMEA, to find out what this group is all about.
EMEA Press Centre: Let’s start with the basics. What does Customer Service and Support do?
Guido Häring: We help our customers get the most value humanly possible from their investment in technology. We do this by providing technical support for people who use Microsoft products. We provide that support over the phone, or online, or in customer offices around the world. It’s not just technical queries from customers that we address, but other questions like licensing queries from our industry partners and so on. Our goal is to resolve customer issues quickly by connecting them with the best person or resource in our global organisation, and to proactively identify support issues and trends to prevent issues in the first place.
EPC: How technically skilled is a support engineer expected to be, typically?
Häring: We can only do our job if we have talented and dedicated support personnel. In terms of enterprise support, the people who call us are already the last line of defence on the customer side. They are usually our customers’ most technical people — let’s say the IT manager of a bank, for example — highly knowledgeable and experienced. And they expect the support technician to have a higher level of technical knowledge that they do. It’s a daunting task and a huge responsibility. These guys have access to source code, and also contribute customer feedback straight into the product development cycle. So we have a really high bar for the knowledge of our enterprise people, for our front-line support team and our escalation engineers.
We need technically skilled staff with good listening skills to make that happen.
You just can’t provide good support without a huge investment in education. Our average investment in training is approximately 240 hours per year per employee, across the board, and a new employee may have up to 800 hours per year to receive the right level of certification to provide support. In preparing for Windows Vista alone, thousands of support engineers participated in training sessions ranging anywhere from a week to up to a month.
EPC: Language must be a major consideration in the EMEA region.
Häring: Receiving support in your own language is important to all our customers. In EMEA we have support professionals in 39 countries, covering 35 languages, and we are constantly increasing the number of languages we support.
In November last year we added Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Slovakian languages for Xbox support, as demand in these markets was growing very fast. So far feedback from customers has been very positive.
Currently we are adding Macedonian and Ukrainian as native languages for Customer Service and Technical Support in Central and Eastern Europe. The next step is to add Hebrew to the native language support for small and medium-sized businesses.
Language is not the only thing, though. Cultural awareness — soft skills — are absolutely crucial to customer satisfaction.
For example, I recall one incident where a British customer didn’t get the resolution he wanted during the support call, and said ‘Thank you very much’. The support person, not understanding the caller’s sarcasm, took it as a compliment and did not escalate to the next level That’s the kind of thing I mean by cultural awareness, and this is a really important part of the training our support people receive to ensure that our customers receive the right local support.
EPC: What can a customer expect when they call Microsoft technical support?
Häring: Customers will get a solution as long as it’s humanly possible. The resolution time depends on the issue, the level of complexity and the level of technical expertise and ability of the customer. The reaction time can depend on the type of contract the customer has. There is a difference, between a Premier Enterprise contract and, say, the built-in support for a consumer product.
From a consumer perspective, we actually re-launched our consumer support with Windows Vista and 2007 Office and now give unlimited free support in the first 90 days for retail products. Before, our customers received two free support incidents with their product. We undertook research that told us 99 per cent of customer problems call in the first 90 days while people set up their software. After 90 days most customers don’t need support. So, we changed our approach and customers are telling us this option is much better.
Consumer customers calling our support line will be connected with a customer representative who will help resolve the issue as quickly as possible. More than 85 per cent of the issues are solved within one call. Should the issue prove to be more complex, we work with the customer by bringing in specific expertise to help find a solution.
It is different for enterprises. Take a systems manager of a mission-critical IT environment in Lithuania, for example. They’ll get a choice of whether they want to speak with a local support engineer in Lithuanian who has more general technical knowledge, or with the ultimate technical expert. Should this be a problem which is more complex or which we have not seen before we will send the incident up to our global team of escalation engineers who would provide support in English. And of course if we could not resolve the issue over the phone for an enterprise customer, we would send an engineer onsite to their premises.
EPC: How did CSS prepare for the launch of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007?
Häring: This was the launch of the decade for us, so we invested heavily to prepare all of our employees and support partners. This was a significant investment, because usually what you see is an initial sales spike so we built in a large margin to ensure all our early customers would receive great service. I’m happy to say that we exceeded our customer satisfaction targets in EMEA, even with the first calls coming in, so the preparation and training efforts really paid off.
Because of our high level of engagement with customers, we are in many respects the eyes and ears of the product groups, and have a very significant influence on product development. Data from all our customer interactions is captured and analysed, and if patterns are discovered they are sent to the product group. Then there is a review process, through which we review customer feedback together with senior executives in the product groups — sometimes up to the vice president level.
During the Windows Vista beta, we supported 21,000 customers over the phone and e-mail, and worked with the product groups to include this customer feedback in the final release. In addition, we helped the product groups to integrate several new features, including Easy Assist and the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool. Both of these are making remote assistance and the collection of diagnostic data much easier during troubleshooting.
Personally, it’s exciting being able to directly inject customer feedback into products. I get great satisfaction from looking at a function in a new product and thinking ”We did that, CSS contributed”. It’s a good feeling.
EPC: Is Customer Service and Support a profit-making part of the company?
Häring: We’re not a revenue-generating division at Microsoft. For the enterprise segment, we have support contracts, such as Premier Support, that are priced at market rates. In the consumer area, the support cost is part of the product. A third support area is partner support. Because we rely heavily on our partners — consultants, developers, resellers and so on — we make significant investments to make sure they are fully supported. These three areas all have very different financial models.
EPC: How happy are people with the support they receive from Microsoft, and how do satisfaction levels compare with those of other technology companies?
Häring: We measure customer satisfaction through our extensive customer surveys — both the overall Microsoft customer survey and our ongoing CSS transactional surveys. Unfortunately, there is no standard industry measure for customer satisfaction in the industry, so we cannot compare our numbers with other companies’ levels.
One of my former roles was in quality management, so I am conscious of saying only what I can prove. We have made continual improvements over time and our services are consistently getting better. For example, in customer service we are currently exceeding our customer satisfaction target levels.
We have a major initiative at Microsoft that we call Customer-Focused Culture, the essence of which is putting customers at the centre of everything we do. We noticed, years ago, that classic call-centre metrics such as the number of cases closed and call times were driving behaviours that don’t necessarily support a positive customer experience. For example, if a support technician is measured on the number of customer cases closed, he or she will naturally avoid taking on the difficult questions, even if he or she is the best person on earth to answer that — because it will bring down his numbers. We therefore decided to evaluate our people differently, based on customer-focused behaviours observed by their managers.
EPC: The company recently opened a new support centre in Bucharest — what was the reasoning behind this?
Häring: Our three largest European support hubs are in Germany, the UK and France, in that order. Eastern Europe is a very high-growth area for Microsoft and technology in general, and we really needed to have a support presence on the ground over there. Language was an important reason. Virtually every country there has its own language. Many of our people in Romania speak three and even four languages – it’s amazing. The second reason was simply to increase the number of technical support staff that we have overall. As a recruiting ground, Romania has a wealth of technical expertise. We are really pleased with the people we have hired there. I love visiting all of our European centres; the skills you see in our offices are really impressive.
EPC: What are the goals for CSS over the next several years?
Häring: We know that our customers’ favourite support call is the one they never need to make. The focus is really shifting from problem solving to problem prevention.
For example, over the past few years we invested heavily in preventing problems from occurring for our enterprise customers. The Microsoft Exchange Server Risk Assessment and Health Check programmes are proactive risk assessment reviews designed for Microsoft Premier Support customers in an effort to help them operate their environments more effectively.
Another focus is delivery. We have seen a big increase in the number of customers who want to get the answer online instead of calling us. You’ll see more online services from us over the next few years.
