How to Create Fans through an Amazing Customer Experience

By Sue Morris, GM - Worldwide Customer Service Leader, Microsoft

Sue Morris, GM - Worldwide Customer Service Leader, Microsoft

Every customer support interaction is an opportunity to provide an amazing experience that can develop fans. This requires Microsoft to push the boundaries of traditional customer service rules to focus on new areas to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations. ‘Customer Support Advocates’ is what we have renamed our customer representatives because they are building advocacy for our brand. They must be fans of Microsoft products to have that additional level of passion, curiosity and tenacity that will create fans of our customers. Investing in our people and our culture has set the foundation to redefine the customer experience to a whole new level that builds a deeper relationship of trust and confidence.

Putting the customer at the centre of everything we do

The Microsoft mission is to “Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” Our culture is focused on putting the customer at the centre of everything we do from designing and engineering to providing world class service for customers. It is important to continue learning from our customers and consistently looking for better ways for customer support advocates to provide great solutions and added value.

Our customer support advocate teams are sharing customer ideas with development and engineering teams through a closed feedback loop called Speak Up! It is giving a voice to customer support advocates, allowing them to share ideas and get support from Microsoft to improve processes, products, and services for customers. We also have opportunities for engineers to work with customer support advocates in CSS Showcase to learn what customers are asking customer support advocates and how they work with Microsoft products and services.

Higher value conversations and higher satisfaction levels

Channels of Choice are provided for customers to decide how they would like to best resolve their problem. If their question is simple, a resolution can be generated very quickly through artificial intelligence and machine learning. It is important to combine this technology with the personal touch of an individual if a customer is requiring more assistance.

The best channel of growth for Customer Service and Support is listening to and learning from our customers

When a customer support advocate comes on the chat or call to dive deeper to resolve a problem, they don’t have to ask, “How can I help you?” The advocate already has a clearer picture of the issue from the details that have been put in through artificial intelligence, so the customer doesn’t have to start over, enabling the advocate to seamlessly resolve an issue a lot quicker. Freeing up time by reducing repeated information allows more time for customer support advocates to provide added-value advice. This empowers both the front-line advocate to support customers with higher quality conversations and the customer to immediately gain more trust and higher levels of satisfaction as they are getting the help they need in an efficient manner. It’s a great experience for a customer to complete an interaction with our customer support team gaining more expertise and productivity.

The best channel of growth for Customer Service and Support is listening to and learning from our customers. Utilizing customer surveys with the enablement of machine learning helps customer support advocates know during or quickly after a call or chat if the customer was happy or unhappy with the call and why. This is a critically important resource for an advocate to learn right away rather than later when it doesn’t register as well because too much time has lapsed.

Empowering customers to achieve more

Fostering a culture where every person understands, feels and acts with a deep sense of responsibility will deliver great customer experiences. We have identified 4 customer expected behaviors (Communicate Effectively, Accountability, Resourcefulness and Empathy) that we are cultivating within our culture and our people to help deliver a world class customer experience.

We empower our front-line advocates and support teams by making it easy for them to solve customer issues with urgency and ownership. We are working to equip customer service advocates with great tools, processes, and training and we teach them how to communicate with customers in a way that builds trust and confidence to ultimately create fans of Microsoft.

Now advocates can show customers how to find solutions to their questions easier and learn new ways to maximize their use of Microsoft products and services. It empowers a customer to be able to be more productive with their products and feel great about their interaction with a support advocate. It’s amazing to see our customer support advocates WOW a customer and create a fan.