Support Escalation Management

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft's products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers' expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft's portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

Advocacy and Customer Trust (ACT) delivers connected support experiences to our customers to gain and keep their trust.

Our Service Manager will be positioned and aligned with our customers as Chief Operating Officers within the account, strategically placed to ensure that we have the appropriate level of engagement to support and drive the customer's reactive support landscape and improve operational health. As such you will work with some of the world's largest companies, public sector depts and not for profit organisations pursuing strategic activities, utilising Microsoft technologies to modernise their business.

We create an environment where you can do your best work and build a career both in the Service Manager role as well as the wider Microsoft. As your interests and goals evolve we will enable you to connect you with a diverse, thriving community that can help you grow.

Weekend on-standby/on-call will be required within the local policies and laws of the hiring country, typically one weekend in six.

In the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization we are looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success. As a Senior Support Escalation Manager, you will be the primary contact managing escalated customer and partner issues. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, hone your problem-solving, collaboration and orchestration skills, and deepen your relationship management expertise.

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 100% from home.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Collaboration

• Owns escalated issues and manages account-aligned customer incidents to identify and remove barriers. Ensures existing processes are not a blocker to customer issue resolution and influences the direction of process improvement efforts with a global perspective. Acts as an expert and provides informal guidance to Support Escalation team members on how to handle moderate to highly complex cases.

• Leverages relationships across teams to remove roadblocks. Establishes and oversees the development of written protocols to ensure customer issues are resolved. Identifies reoccurring roadblocks across the team and escalates as needed.

Communication

• Identifies and builds strategic relationships with internal teams, partners, and communications with senior leadership to resolve issues that are complex in scope.

• Manages customer and field expectations around issue response and represents the company independently. Ensures customer and MSFT internal stakeholders stay informed on the response and resolution status of customer issues. Communicates and influences internally to drive faster issue resolution.

Customer Resolution

• Leads strategic projects designed to improve resolution times, customer satisfaction, and support experience.

• Leads inter-regions, cross-regions, cross-group, or account team unit (ATU) initiatives by creating plans and managing relationships with other business units to improve the customer support experience for a group of customers or a specific region/area. Acts as a subject matter expert on best practices to support the customer experience.

• Reviews status updates to customers and provides informal guidance to others on communicating with internal stakeholders through various channels of communication for highly sensitive or difficult issues.

• Proactively coordinates resources and establishes relationships to drive opportunities within the team and across stakeholder groups in postmortem discussions to remediate future issues.

• Acts as an internal expert to resolve longer running, sensitive, or escalated issues or acts as a primary contact for escalated issues on behalf of less experienced IC levels. Identifies and builds relationships with various internal and external teams and senior leaders to resolve customer issues. Leads strategic projects. Informally provides coaching, mentorship, or support to less experienced Support Escalation Managers to resolve customer issues.

Process Improvement

• Reviews postmortem executive summaries and identifies patterns across customer issues. Creates strategies to resolve reoccurring or highly sensitive issues in partnership with leadership.

• Surfaces feedback from the team and drives collaboration across functions to identify systematic issues and leads process breakdowns to ensure resolution/progress. Creates strategy for process improvements and leads project or workgroup to improve internal processes.

Vendor Relationships

• Owns and leads relationships with outsource vendor to resolve issues and foster positive cultural and behavioral changes.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

Required/minimum qualifications

• Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 4+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 6+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR 9+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR equivalent experience.
• Reliable incident and escalation management experience.
• Proficient C-level stakeholder management knowledge.
• Business level fluency to read, write and speak English.

Background Check Requirements:

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:

• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 8+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 9+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR 12+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR equivalent experience.
• Project management experience.
• Experience working with Microsoft products and services.
• Cloud Technology Certification (Azure Fundamentals. M365 Fundamentals).

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.