Technical Support Lead

With over 18,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft’s end-to-end customer experience. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers come to us not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, but also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience.

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 help customers and partners resolve their issues quickly, prevent future problems from occurring, and demonstrate new ways to achieve more from their Microsoft investment.

Connected Customer Support Experience delivers connected support experiences to our customers to gain and keep their trust.

Microsoft has a tremendous opportunity to exceed customer expectations and drive greater customer loyalty and trust, which leads to greater satisfaction, retention, and growth. The CE&S organization is looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success to help us build a future where customers come to us, not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, and also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience that is rooted in our commitment to delivering on customer outcomes.

About the role: Are you a firefighter that loves to solve complex customer support issues and a problem solver who is passionate about building customer trust and confidence? Do you excel in fast-paced, dynamic environments where you work with strategic customers to solve significant support challenges as they transition to the Microsoft cloud? Do you thrive on engaging with executives and exceeding customer expectations in moments that matter most? If so, we invite you to apply to join our team as a Technical Support Lead.

As a Technical Support Lead you will be a trusted advisor, to our largest and most strategic customers at times where they are experiencing significant and complex technical challenges. You will be an orchestrator, bringing the best of Microsoft’s people, processes, and technical capabilities to enable account teams and Customer Success Account Managers (CSAMs) for a predefined period to understand customer support issues, agree on customer expectations, and develop strategic programs to deliver world class customer support outcomes.

This role may require travel to customer site to meet with Senior executives and manage a crisis situation being onsite.

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.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• 11+ 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 Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 6+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
  • OR equivalent experience.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• 16+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 13+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
  • OR Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 10+ 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).

Support Escalation Management IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $129,200 - $273,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $162,000 - $299,400 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:  

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until Jauary 20, 2025

#CES #CSS #CCSE

Customer Resolution

• Develops innovative solutions to resolve highly complex and highly visible escalation issues, playing a key role in development of protocols for escalating issues. Establishes relationships across regions with various internal and external teams and gains buy-in with executive leaders to resolve global, cross-functional customer issues by establishing strategic projects. Develops strategic actions plans to resolve highly complex customer issues and prevent future problems from occurring.
• Establishes strategic plans and assigns ownersship on cross-region, cross-group, cross-business, or account team unit (ATU) initiatives to resolve higly sensitive, complex, political, or systemic customer issues across regions. Orchestrates resources across regions to improve the customer support experience for customers that have a global span. Represents the business as a leading expert in one or two technical areas. Identifies and shares best practices across functional teams to support the customer experience.
• Creates communication plans and communicates status updates to internal and external executives contacts, for highly complex and highly visible escalation issues through various channels of communication for highly sensitive or difficult issues.
• Designs and coordinates resources to lead strategic projects that improve resolution times, customer satisfaction, and support experience, making changes to ensure global consistency across teams and time zones.
• Drives opportunities across regional stakeholder groups in postmortem discussions and offers strategic proposals to senior leaders on improvements to remediate future issues.

Collaboration

• Manages relationships with leaders across teams and establishes accountability to remove roadblocks. Uses knowledge of business impact to establish processes and written protocols that ensure customer issues are resolved. Identifies reoccurring roadblocks across regions and coordinates teams and resources to resolve them.
• Identifies systematic patterns of issues and gains buy-in from cross-regional leadership to address trends and confirm root cause. Resolves strategic issues with other regional leaders to ensure existing processes are not a blocker to customer issue resolution across the region. Develops and documents best practices for Support Escalation team members on achieving best in class reactive support outcomes.

Communication

• Acts as a technical expert for the business on conference calls to implement standards used by others that represent the company. Ensures senior leaders and executives stay informed of the response and resolution status of customer issues. Communicates and influences internally to drive faster issue resolution. Ensures agreement across the business around customer and field expectations and resolution.
• Expands cross-regional network of relationships with internal and external teams and partners and proactively communicates with cross-region leadership on a broad range of escalated issues that are highly complex in scope, and oversees their resolution.

Process Improvement

• Removes barriers around systematic issues and process breakdowns across businesses to drive desired customer outcomes. Creates strategy for process improvements and assigns ownership across project or workgroups to improve internal processes. Leads communication with project owners and internal stakeholders to manage project expectations.
• Creates executive summaries and creates strategies to resolve reoccurring issues across functions. Establishes best practices across the region to create strategy and gains buy-in from cross-regional leadership to resolve systemic issues.

Other

• Embody our and