The Role of a TAM

Managed support offers customers an ongoing relationship with specific Microsoft personnel. This generally takes the form of a Technical Account Manager (TAM), a Microsoft contact who typically maintains a profile of the customer’s software infrastructure and key IT issues that it faces and ensures that problems get resolved. The TAM also proactively alerts the customer to applicable patches, upgrades, workshops, and other opportunities. The TAM is the customer’s advocate within Microsoft. Depending on the support program, the customer’s size, and the fees paid, the customer may share a TAM with several other customers or may have a dedicated TAM. The largest customers may have more than one TAM, and some TAMs work full-time at the customer’s place of business.

A TAM must have a comprehensive set of skills. A typical TAM has sufficient technical depth to work with the customer’s IT teams and to provide basic advice related to Microsoft software and broad solutions built on Microsoft platforms. A TAM must also have business sense and people skills in order to understand the business needs of their customer account(s), and to understand customer problems and communicate effectively between the customer and Microsoft support and product teams. TAMs must straddle the interests of both Microsoft and their accounts, and successful ones become trusted members of their customers’ IT teams—studies have shown that customers with TAMs have significantly higher customer satisfaction rates. Because TAMs must invest a great deal of time and effort in developing a deep understanding of their customers’ environments, Microsoft tries to minimize TAM account turnover; in fact, TAMs commonly spend years assigned to their accounts.