Support Escalation Manager

With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the mission of the Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers achieve their business outcomes faster with technology that does more.

Within CE&S, the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization builds trust and confidence for every person and organization through delivering a seamless support experience. In CSS, we are powered by Microsoft’s AI technology to help consumers, businesses, partners, and more, resolve their issues quickly and securely, helping prevent future problems from occurring and achieving more from their Microsoft investment.

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

This Incident Manager role will focus on Reactive Support Management for Unified Support for our Citizen Alliance Support customers as a key member of the account team. You will actively engage with customers, Microsoft Support Engineers and Microsoft Product Engineers to manage support request health while developing relationships and account-specific context. Insights derived from Reactive Support Management activities will empower this role to tailor the customer’s reactive support experience and assist with proactive risk mitigation and overall Operational Health improvement while having the ability to translate technical solutions into business language.

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 50% 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.

**Responsibilities**:
Customer Resolution
- Acts as a primary contact to understand issues and improve the experiences of account-aligned customers independently. Maintains and develops relationships with various internal and external teams to resolve customer issues. Mentors others the on Support Escalation Management team. Acts as a key member of projects to drive key strategic initiatives.
- Acts as a key player when supporting inter-regional, cross-regional, cross-group, or account team unit (ATU) initiatives by gathering feedback and identifying resources to improve the customer support experience for a group of customers or a specific region/area. Models’ best practices to support the customer experience.
- Provides status updates to customers and internal stakeholders through various channels of communication regarding issues, following the documented process.
- Acts on or plays a key role in strategic projects designed to improve resolution times, customer satisfaction, and support experience.
- Identifies trends across internal postmortems and suggests resources to drive opportunities within the team and across stakeholder groups in postmortem discussions to remediate future issues.

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 acts as a key player during process improvement efforts. Mentors other Support Escalation team members on how to handle moderate to highly complex cases.

Communication
- 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.
- Takes ownership of and nurtures relationships with internal teams and partners and proactively communicates with senior leadership on issues complex in scope and provides solutions to resolve them.

Process Improvement
- Identifies systematic issues and process breakdown and participates in a project or workgroup to improve systematic issues and internal processes.
- Creates an executive summary detailing the customer issue, impact on the business, and status of the resolution. Identifies patterns in customer issues and supports the delivery of strategies to resolve them.

Vendor Relationships
- Part