The following is a guest blog from Aileen Allkins, Corporate Vice President – Customer Service & Support at Microsoft. To view the original post, click here. 

Last week I had the privilege of giving the opening keynote at the Customer Response Summit in Chicago. It was a great opportunity to connect, engage, and learn from other customer service leaders across many industries to hear what they’re doing to create delighted and loyal customers. In addition, I was able to share some insights into our digital transformation in Customer Service and Support at Microsoft and I’ve shared some highlights of my presentation below.

Our customers range from individual consumers to the biggest enterprises in the world. We support developers, gamers, government agencies, CTOs, small business owners, parents, grandparents, and everyone in between. Essentially, we support the world. Each year we have nearly 70 million assisted support interactions and over a billion unassisted support interactions across multiple channels including phone, chat, email, communities, and social. We have thousands of engineers and advocates across Microsoft employees and delivery partners, who provide deep technical support as well as non-technical support and customer service across more support and service scenarios than we can quantify.

When I started at Microsoft and took on the challenge to digitally transform the Customer Service & Support organisation, I quickly realised that with such a broad scope of customers and technologies, there was no single program, tool or technology that we could implement across the organisation that would magically make us “digital” and that the transformation needed to be broken down into smaller chunks.

At Microsoft, we took a step back to have a worldview on the impact of digital disruption. We are looking at how the intelligent cloud and mobile are changing how customers want to interact with companies. We are looking at ways to support customers who are using multiple, interconnected devices and how to help them with problems that potentially span multiple brands. We are also considering how customers are much more dependent upon us in a server-less world to ensure their business continuity as well as how we can help them achieve more with our technologies.

Regardless of the changes in technology available to us, and regardless of the world digitally transforming, when it comes to customer support some things remain the same. First and foremost, we would all prefer than customers never experienced problems and so had less need to contact Customer Support. Understandably, customers would prefer to avoid problems altogether and when they do have them, most would prefer to self-solve as the first step and want us to make it easy for them to do that.

We initially focused the first phases of our digital transformation on ‘Shifting Left’. Commonly known in the service and support industry, Shift Left strategies focus on moving issue resolution as close to the customer as possible, and we are doing that through resolving issues before they happen and providing improved solutions to self-solve. AI and machine learning provide the foundation for our Shift Left strategy and I truly believe the potential for what we can achieve is only limited by our imagination. Virtual agents are not new, but the machine learning and natural language technology behind them is significantly improving the value we can offer customers during self-solve scenarios.

The customer experience is at the forefront of our digital transformation and we want to provide customers with support how and when they want it. If, during their interaction with our virtual agent, a customer decides they would prefer to connect with a live agent, they can seamlessly switch at any time. Our virtual agent then takes on a supporting role to the live agent, providing all of the details the customer has already shared about their problem and offering additional solutions. The agent can then rank the quality of the recommendations and/or add their own, thereby continuing to teach our virtual agent and making it more valuable for the next customer.

We are progressing well on our digital transformation journey. Customer support scenarios, one by one, are being streamlined or automated with AI and machine learning being applied. What is most exciting to see is that with the time we save, we are able to add value to some of our customer interactions by conducting what we call ‘Achieve More’ conversations, helping customers get additional value from their Microsoft products and services. In our pilots, we see a significant increase in customer satisfaction on cases where we have this additional conversation and in many cases we also see increased consumption of our products and services.

Our digital transformation is a journey towards creating a world class support experience that delights customers and creates fans. By Shifting Left to reduce volume, we are able to focus on the more complicated support scenarios, providing our customers with more value and helping them achieve more with our products and technologies. Whilst our journey may take different paths and we will have lots of learnings along the way, one constant will remain the same – our customers will always be at the centre.

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Today, our customers have everything they need to communicate in the palm of their hand. Mobile brings about a unique and powerful convergence of communication channels — voice, email, chat, social, SMS — in one very portable device. This has a profound impact on how our customers communicate with each other, with the world, and with brands. It creates new challenges for brands to adjust to the protocols, cadence and sheer scale for customer support.

We’ve learned, in the digital age, that it’s no longer enough to publish a toll free number and staff a call center during business hours to provide for the needs of our customers. There are many new communication channels we’ve had to embrace and new skills we’ve had to learn to provide for the needs of our customers, in a social, mobile, 24×7 global marketplace.

At Freshdesk, we look at customer engagement through the lens of what we call The Great Pyramid of Customer Support.

This framework, based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, provides a structure to help organizations assess their support capabilities and determine what to prioritize. It can be particularly useful for determining how to address a new channel. Here we will apply it to mobile support and engagement:

Chaos to Control — When you enter a new channel it’s usually chaos. There is a learning curve on how to best communicate within a channel and how to engage.  The first order of business is usually controlling the chaos: tracking and managing tickets, and delivering a consistent and effective customer experience in the channel. The reality is though that mobile is not really a new channel. It’s a new environment, but it encompasses most of the channels you’re already using. So the key for starting to support mobile is to not treat it as a separate engagement environment. You can start out by continuing to use the channels you support today. Just be present and listen. More important than adding new channels and capabilities is to maintain a single system of record across mobile and any other channels you support, to ensure you have a single view of the customer.

Reactive to Proactive — The newest channels for support have changed the paradigm. For a long time customer support has been a one-to-one interaction. With social media, conversations have moved from one-to-one– email, phone, chat – to many-to-many. On social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook your customers are announcing their desires or problems to the world. Support is no longer about reacting – waiting for the phone to ring. Your customers are taking to social, whether you want to be there or not. Similarly, being proactive in mobile means being there, delivering a native experience. It’s not just about providing access to existing tools like your knowledge base or email. You need to consider the unique qualities of mobile platforms and the habits of mobile users, to make it easy for them to get what they need, at the time and place they need it. This is also where you can insert proactive messaging in your apps to avert issues you know are likely.

Scale — As you learn the rules and idiosyncrasies of a new channel the next challenge is scale. You need to be able to extend the level of support you have on your best channels to the new channels. And, of course, you want to do this without having to hire a large new team. Technology can help here. The caveat is to leverage technology to enhance the experience rather than put more layers between you and your customer. Knowledge bases will enable your customers to find answers themselves, if you make them easy to access. Channels like in-app messaging that feel native to mobile and allow agents to handle multiple tickets at once work well here. And automations can help those agents manage that workload.

Aligning With Business — Once you’ve gotten your tools and processes in place and your mobile support is humming, then you can begin to think more broadly about making an impact across your company. Is your support organization aligned with the goals of your customers and your business? Great customer service has the ability to do much more than solve customer problems. If done right, it can extend the value of the brand and create brand advocates. It can also be your best channel to provide feedback and insights to help guide your company’s plans. Be sure to collect data and setup a feedback loop in line with other support channels, and ensure the connections with other critical parts of your organization. This is also where you should be making sure that the systems and tools in place are working for your team and that they are engaged and happy.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

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