Director of Area Support

With over 17,000 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.

Our Director of Area Support + 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 organizations pursuing strategic activities, utilizing Microsoft technologies to modernize their business. We create an environment where you can do your best work and build a career both in the Area IM+ 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.

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.

**Responsibilities**:
**Responsibilities**:
**Customer Resolution**:

- Required to be on-call during shifts which will include nights and weekends and available to take ownership of escalations to Senior Leaders, liaising between the customer and Senior Leaders across organizations within Microsoft.
- Leads 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.

**Collaboration**:

- Leverages relationships across Area 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-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.

**Communication**:

- 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

**Process Improvement**:

- Support Area and regional leadership and collaborate with the Area Business Partner to identify systematic issues and leads process improvement efforts to ensure continuous improvement Recommend process improvements and support the Area Connected Reactive Support forums with identified actions.
- 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 area is trained.

**Qualifications**:
**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.
- Crisis Management and C-Suite communication experience.
- Cloud Technology Certification (minimum of Azure Fundamentals and/or M365 Fundamentals).

**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 techno