• Sidebar: The Role of a TAM
• Sidebar: How the Assisted Support Process Works
• Illustration: Support Organization

Comprising a significant portion of the overall company, Microsoft’s support organization works with partners to form a worldwide support network that complements the company’s primary mission of selling software. Microsoft provides customers and partners with an array of support services, ranging from free Web-based help to direct interaction with product development groups. By understanding Microsoft Support’s mission, organizational structure, and support capabilities, customers and partners can make better purchase decisions when faced with the plethora of support options and programs.

Mission and Goals

Microsoft support’s primary mission is not to be a profit center but rather to be a "product enabler" for Microsoft’s customers and partners; that is, the support organization provides both proactive and reactive services that help ensure that Microsoft’s large portfolio of products can be successfully deployed and work as intended when used by customers. Its secondary mission is to be a major conduit for feeding customer problems back to product groups so that Microsoft developers can build better products. Wherever possible, it promotes problem prevention by transferring knowledge to customers and partners through a variety of means.

To achieve this mission, the support organization provides phone and online support services to customers and partners worldwide on a 7x24 basis in approximately 40 different languages. However, this organization is not comprised solely of Microsoft employees: to get the most out of each dollar spent, Microsoft uses a network of employees, contractors, wholly outsourced support providers, online resources, and even volunteers to provide its overall support services offerings.

The support organization costs Microsoft far more than it collects for paid support programs, and both the revenues and costs are allocated to the company's seven strategic business units (SBUs), giving these product groups a financial incentive to create products that require minimal support. (The SBUs are Client, Information Worker, Server and Tools, Home and Entertainment, MSN, Business Solutions, and Mobile and Embedded; for more details, see "Seven Businesses Push into FY'05" on page 33 of the Sept. 2004 Update.) The support organization does have a goal of recovering the costs of delivering support to partners, businesses, and governmental organizations through various paid support program fees and a portion of Software Assurance license revenues. However, the costs of providing support for end users of the Windows client OS, Office, and home and gaming products and services are bundled into the product license fees.

Parallel Organizations: Centralized and Regional

Because Microsoft needs to resolve customer problems quickly, but must deal with a mix consisting of a large set of products, multiple global sales regions, languages, and a very diverse customer set that ranges from complete computer novices to highly experienced hardware and software developers, its support organization has evolved into a complex structure. However, over the last few years it has restructured support into a single organization that spans all Microsoft business units and geographies. Microsoft did this to gain greater operational efficiency and to provide more consistency from region to region.

Vice President Rick Devenuti has responsibility for all Microsoft services, which includes not only product support but also Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) and Microsoft’s internal IT organization, MSIT (formerly known as the Operations and Technology Group).

Under Devenuti, support is primarily centralized under Lori Moore, vice president of the global Customer Service and Support (CSS) organization (formerly known as Product Support Services, or PSS). Moore is responsible for most, but not all, of the support organization.

Parallel to Moore are four regional vice presidents who are responsible for coordinating the whole suite of service offerings for their respective customers in North America; Latin America; a region consisting of Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and a region consisting of Asia, the Pacific, and Greater China. These executives manage services personnel based in the field offices, who are mainly MCS consultants and technical account managers (TAMs)—the primary Microsoft support points of contact for large, enterprise customers that have purchased Premier support contracts. (For details on the specific responsibilities of a TAM, see the sidebar "The Role of a TAM".)

This split management structure is based on the following beliefs:

• Certain enterprise-level support and consulting personnel perform account management functions that require frequent face-to-face interaction with customers, and this can be best accomplished when these employees are situated close to the customer and are more familiar with the customer’s cultural and business environments
• Regional services managers can better understand and take into account the idiosyncrasies of certain regions and coordinate all service-related interactions with their enterprise and partner customers in those regions
• Broadly available support functions, such as phone support and Web-based support, are more efficient when pooled into regional support centers and run as a global organization coordinated by a single manager.

(For an organizational chart, see "Support Organization".)

The Customer Service and Support Organization

Within Moore’s CSS organization, responsibility for the pooled support services is also divided into three regions each with a general manager: the Americas; EMEA; and Asia, the Pacific, and Japan. These managers are responsible for the support centers and other support resources serving customers within their respective regions, whether that support is provided by Microsoft or outsourced to a partner.

However, support for consumer products (MSN, MSN TV, Xbox, PC Games, and Home Products) is not handled by a regional manager but by a separate general manager reporting to Moore. This is because the MSN and Home and Entertainment SBUs are organized differently from the commercial business, and the support teams organize to best fit their client team's organizational structure. Because the MSN and Home and Entertainment products are supported by outsourced support vendors with global footprints, Microsoft can manage those relationships largely from Redmond, WA. 

Within each region and the consumer products groups, support services can be broken down into the following teams:

Customer Services (CS). Initial support calls first go through the CS organization. Here the cases are classified, assigned a case number, and routed to the appropriate support group. Customers with Premier or MS Services Partner Advantage agreements may also engage their support resource to help improve the problem definition and provide initial troubleshooting guidance prior to submitting the case. For support requests for products that do not include free support, CS ensures that the customer either has a support contract or transacts for paid-per-incident support. CS is also the conduit for handling complaints and other nontechnical issues. Given the volume of incidents handled by Microsoft for both the inbound and outbound function, the vast majority of the CS team is outsourced, with full-time Microsoft employees focused on areas such as operations management, training, and quality management.

Technical Support (TS). TS is home to the support professionals who assist customers with most technical problems. These professionals are divided among separate teams, as follows:

• One set of support centers handles free support for consumer products, such as the Windows client products, Office, Money, and games
• A second set of centers handles paid support for the Windows Server System (WSS) products, including Windows Server and the server applications, plus Visual Studio and development issues related to the Office platform
• A third center handles paid support for Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) products, such as Great Plains, Navision, and Microsoft Customer Relationship Management (MSCRM).

The consumer TS teams are nearly 95% outsourced to support organizations such as Convergys and Sykes Enterprises, while the WSS and MBS teams are handled by Microsoft call centers, where more than 90% of the staff are Microsoft employees (the rest are contractors).

This structure is a response to the nature and volume of support incidents: consumer products generate roughly four times as many incidents as business product incidents, yet are easier to resolve quickly, which makes them more suitable for outsourcing, where the skills needed to handle calls and the corresponding operational costs are much lower. (In North America during fiscal year 2004, TS handled roughly 500,000 business products incidents, compared with more than 2 million consumer incidents.)

Microsoft runs 12 in-house call centers called Global Technical Support Centers (GTSCs) worldwide: four in the United States (Issaquah, WA; Los Colinas, TX; Charlotte, SC; and Fargo, ND), plus Ontario, Canada; Reading, United Kingdom; Les Ulis, France; Munich, Germany; Shanghai, China; Sydney, Australia; Tokyo, Japan; and Bangalore, India.

From a customer’s or partner’s perspective, Microsoft intends the customer service and technical support experience to be uniform and to work seamlessly among outsourced, contract, and Microsoft employees. All TS and CS support centers, including the outsourced ones, are linked by Microsoft’s phone network.

Motivators and Metrics

Even though responsibility for the entire centralized Microsoft support organization falls under Devenuti, it is a matrix organization with support costs and revenues allocated to the seven SBUs. Furthermore, TS has dotted-line reporting relationships to the SBUs, and each business unit has a liaison with the Microsoft support organization.

These dotted-line relationships involve joint planning activities, shared budget responsibilities, and shared performance metrics. They also help ensure several desirable behaviors:

• Because the SBUs are charged with the costs of supporting their products and do not have the option to collect additional revenues by raising the price of support programs, the SBUs have a strong incentive to build products that generate lower support loads and are easier to troubleshoot
• Product groups are more motivated to get actively involved in solving customer issues, and to build tools into their products like the automated Windows Error Reporting (WER) feature, which makes problem reporting more comprehensive while bypassing the support organization entirely.

In addition to tracking the overall support budget, income from paid support programs, and support's impact on each SBU's financial results, Microsoft management gauges support performance by two other key metrics:

Average time-to-fix (ATTF). When CSS determines that a defect in Microsoft software is the cause of a problem and there is no reasonable workaround, the issue is passed to a sustained engineering team within the appropriate product development group. Microsoft tracks the time it takes to build, test, and deploy a hotfix that successfully fixes the customer’s problem, and then measures progress by how this metric drops as processes and skills improve.

Critical situations (CritSit) status. Microsoft has implemented new processes to more effectively and consistently manage critical situations around the world for enterprise customers and partners who purchase "managed" Premier, Essential, or Microsoft Services Partner Advantage support contracts.

For critical, high-impact problems involving Microsoft software, in which production, operations, or development is either down or is impacted to the extent that production or profitability will be severely impacted within several days, cases are tracked through a formal CritSit process. The CritSit process includes escalation triggers that can be as short as 60 minutes from the time reported (for the most severe issues). These triggers escalate the problem to higher-level engineers and automatically notify Moore, Devenuti, and other senior managers within CSS, sales, and product development teams. If not resolved within four hours, the most severe cases are escalated again and are automatically reported to Kevin Johnson, group vice president of Worldwide Sales, Marketing, and Services) and CEO Steve Ballmer.

CSS Support Capabilities

CSS’s primary focus is to respond to customer problems and resolve them as quickly and efficiently as possible, a capability known as "break/fix." However, it also has the capability to provide phone-based advisory services to both IT professionals and developers, and to publish resources, such as a searchable "knowledge base" of problems with known solutions, that help customers solve many problems themselves.

Break/Fix

Technical support professionals in GTSCs and outsourced support sites around the world spend the vast amount of their time on the telephone helping customers and partners resolve problems. Microsoft is staffed to provide support for more than 170 products, plus Microsoft Solution Offerings, and to converse with customers in more than 40 different languages. Totaling more than 4,000 Microsoft full-time employees, plus nearly three times that amount in contractors and outsourced support providers, these engineers specialize in particular products (or a family of products) and have access to hardware that allows them to simulate most customer and partner environments when working through problems. (For more information about a typical support process, see the sidebar "How the Assisted Support Process Works".)

In addition to providing phone support, Microsoft’s support organization will dispatch support professionals to customer and partner sites to resolve problems in emergencies and other situations that are deemed critical. This service is expensive, but it can be crucial to solving problems quickly.

CSS support professionals also monitor Microsoft support newsgroups and provide customers with a more economical, albeit less timely, means of resolving issues.

Multivendor Support

Quite frequently, customers have problems that involve interactions between Microsoft software and non-Microsoft hardware or software. The support organization has the ability to resolve many multivendor problems, including those that were initially opened with another vendor.

Microsoft accomplishes this through two channels:

Microsoft Partner Programs. Many ISVs and support providers enrolled in Microsoft’s partner programs have reciprocal support agreements with Microsoft. These partners include both very large multinational product and service organizations, such as Dell, EDS, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and IBM, and many smaller firms scattered around the globe. These partners can escalate customer incidents to their Microsoft colleagues for resolution, and the reverse is also true: CSS support professionals can escalate issues to the partner (CSS stays in the loop until the issue is resolved).

Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet). Microsoft is a member of TSANet, a vendor-neutral nonprofit organization with more than 100 hardware and software vendors that hosts a "quid pro quo" community infrastructure and has defined processes to enable support professionals in member organizations to escalate support issues to their peers in other member organizations.

Developer and Advisory

Not all support calls are related to fixing specific problems. Sometimes customers and partners only need technical advice when working on solution designs, yet the engagement is too small to contract with MCS. This is particularly true for developers, who frequently need specific advice that goes beyond that provided by the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Web site.

Microsoft has dedicated more resources than any other software company to supporting developers, and CSS has more than 800 support professionals that specialize in Visual Studio and SQL Server development and can provide both break/fix and advisory support to developers.

Advisory services are included in managed support programs and are also available on a straight hourly fee basis for customers and partners who aren't in these programs.

Knowledge Base

CSS is responsible for creating and maintaining Microsoft’s Knowledge Base—a free, publicly available, searchable database of known problems, frequently accompanied with solutions or workarounds to them. The Knowledge Base is currently localized in 21 languages.

Internally, CSS has access to a superset of the customer-accessible Knowledge Base that includes reported problems that have not yet been confirmed or reproduced by Microsoft. This additional knowledge can help customers find out if other customers are experiencing the same problem, which can be key to arriving at a solution. However, only CSS support professionals have access to this information.

Leveraging Support Through Partners

The support resources Microsoft provides using in-house or outsourced support groups are still only the tip of the support iceberg. The vast majority of the total support load is handled by partners that engage customers directly, such as OEMs, Gold Certified Partners for Support Services, and Web-based enthusiast sites and newsgroups supported by volunteer IT professionals.

OEMs. When OEMs and system builders build PCs and servers with Microsoft software installed, including both OS and application software such as Office, they often provide first-level support for these Microsoft products. This support may be included with the hardware or may cost extra.

Gold Certified Partners for Support Services. Instead of buying support directly from Microsoft, many organizations choose to contract with Microsoft Gold Certified Partners for Support Services—partners with support service practices that have been certified by Microsoft to provide support on its products. This arrangement can have significant benefits, including lower cost, multivendor support, and the ability to provide services that Microsoft does not provide, such as permanent on-site staffing and help desk support. (Note: Many OEMs, such as HP and IBM, are also Gold Certified Partners for Support Services.)

MVPs. In recent years Microsoft has fostered a program called the Most-Valued Professionals (MVPs). MVPs are non-Microsoft individuals, such as authors, enthusiasts, developers, academics, and business and technical decision makers, who write books and host newsgroups, message boards, and other user group forums where they share information, publish code samples, and help resolve user issues for free. MVPs do this to get visibility and recognition as authorities in their fields, which ultimately helps them grow their businesses and careers. Microsoft supports MVPs by providing them with resources, such as developer tools, MSDN Universal and TechNet Plus subscriptions, and shared source code. Microsoft also hosts MVP conferences, provides online resources to help them work together as a community, and provides them with deeper communication channels with the Microsoft product groups.

Microsoft, more than any other software firm, focuses on high-volume, lower-price software for the horizontal market. This means that it must support far more customers than any other technology firm, and the majority of these customers are end users or small business owners without advanced IT skills. Without these resources and the support leverage these partners provide, Microsoft would have to build a much larger support organization than it has.

Resources

To access Microsoft’s online support resources (Knowledge Base, newsgroups, download site, etc.) see support.microsoft.com.

More information on support services and programs can be found at www.microsoft.com/services/microsoftservices/supp.mspx.

More information on the Gold Support Partner Program and members is available at www.microsoft.com/support/partner.

More information on TSANet can be found at www.tsanet.org.

More information on the MVP program is available at mvp.support.microsoft.com.