Director of Area Support

Do you want to produce impactful support results for customers? Do you want to join a growing, thriving team where you will be empowered to drive successful outcomes? Do you have the skills to balance the business impact felt by our customers with the available resources and prioritisation needs of our support business? If so, and you’re happy to be the person the customer calls in their most challenging time, talk to us

As aDirector of Area Support you will own Crisis Communications for your Area and liaise with the C-Suite of Microsoft’s most strategic customers, acting as a trusted advisor and partner for your Area’s Leadership (CVP/AVP/GM). You’ll be the Commander and Technical Leader during a Service Incident or large scale event, co-ordinating key leaders and decision makers across our Support and Engineering Organisations. You’ll have executive-facing communication skills to restore confidence, and partner with the customer’s Account Team to prevent recurrences through the Customer Engagement Plan to improve and shape the support experience, acting with urgency to produce the best possible outcomes.

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
- 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.

Other
- Embody our culture and values

**Qualifications**:
Required/Minimum Qualifications
- Extensive technology industry, customer service, or related experience
- OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND very strong technology industry, customer service, or related experience
- OR Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND strong 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).
- Proficiency in English language

Additional or Preferred Qualifications
- Extensive technology industry, customer service, or related experience
- Poject or program management experience.
- Experience working with Microsoft products and services.
- Advanced Cloud Technology Certification levels such as Level 200 and 300 certifications in Microsoft