Area Support Lead

• Required to be on-call during shifts, including after hours and weekends and available to take ownership of escalations to Senior Leaders, liaising between the customer and Senior Leaders across organizations within Microsoft
• Acts as a subject matter expert on best practices to support the customer experience. Crafts and executes executive summaries and identifies patterns across customer issues. Creates strategies to resolve reoccurring or highly sensitive issues in partnership with Area, Support and Product Group leadership
• Own Service Incident or crisis response and management in the Area (before, during and after) – ensure understanding of Field roles and responsibilities. Accountable for ensuring the Region/Area is trained
• Lead strategic projects designed to improve resolution times, customer satisfaction, and support experience. Provides examples and direction to prioritize efforts to prevent and reduce escalations/crises
• Partner with CSU leadership to build and execute plans that improve customer health signals, including reactivity, major incident response plans, proactive recommendations and cloud resiliency
• Sponsor key accounts in region in collaboration with Regional CSU leadership, building relationships and trust with our largest accounts and ensuring that their support experience exceeds expectations
• Partner with account teams and Area Business Partner through contract renewals and assist in deal shaping, ensuing that customers have the right offerings to ensure their success
• Leverages relationships across Regional CSU, Support and Product Groups to remove roadblocks. Establishes and oversees the development of written protocols to ensure customer issues are resolved. Identifies reoccurring roadblocks across the Area and escalates as needed
• Owns escalated issues and manages Area/Region escalated customer crises 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 guidance to Support Escalation team members on how to handle moderate to highly complex cases
• Support Area and regional leadership and collaborate with the Area Business Partner (ABP) to identify systematic issues and leads process improvement efforts to ensure continuous improvement. Recommend process improvements and support the feedback forums with identified actions
• Identifies and builds strategic relationships with internal teams, partners, and communications with senior and executive leadership to resolve issues that are complex in scope
• Leverages precision questioning techniques to understand the pain points of the customer experience during Crisis and then proactively addresses the People/Process/Technology blockers identified
• Customer engagement – both reactive (emergency) and proactive (sponsorship). Confidence calls after outage. Involved in service incident (SI) aka outage Crisis and non-outage crisis for specific, strategic customers

• Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 6+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 8+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR 11+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR equivalent experience
• Crisis Management and C-Suite proven communication capabilities
• Cloud Technology Certification (Azure Fundamentals. M365 Fundamentals)
• 16+ 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 Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 8+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
• OR equivalent experience
• Project management experience
• Experience working with Microsoft products and services
• Knowledge and understanding of Unified Deal Construction and Support a plus

Knowledge and understanding of Unified Deal Construction and Support a plus