Are you passionate about delivering exceptional customer support experiences? Do you thrive on empowering others to truly achieve their full potential? Do you genuinely lead with sincerity and humility, and drive relentlessly for results with a spirit of continuous improvement? If you answered yes to these questions, then we want to hear from you!
The CSS Partner Enablement Frontline organization enables thousands of Partners a month to get the most out of their partnership with Microsoft. Partners reach out to our support organization for help across a vast array of topics involved in being a member of the Microsoft Partner Network including specific topics for Partners that are additionally Cloud Solution Providers. Partners also depend on our team for help when they are publishing to the Commercial Marketplace or are going to co-sell with us.
The Director of Support Engineering for Partner Enablement oversees support for an entire line of business - either Microsoft Partner Network, Cloud Solution Provider programs or the Marketplace program which services all Partners including our most strategic Partners with significant impact on Microsoft's revenue to new Partners with the potential to become the next wave of influential Partners. To be successful in this role, you must be truly customer obsessed, have strong operational focus and deep knowledge and experience in delivering industry leading customer support experiences. You and your team will need to build strong relationships with the OCP field leadership teams, Partner Center engineering groups, and other internal Microsoft organizations at the senior leadership level. You will attract and retain top talent and ensure that they are always ready to engage with our top customers on their most critical and complex needs. This position has global responsibilities and can be based at one of our major CSS sites with strong Partner Enablement presence (Las Colinas, Fargo, Sammamish, Bucharest, Bangalore and/or Shanghai). Other locations may be considered for exceptionally qualified candidates.
This role requires a highly driven, self-starter, and motivated leader. In this role, you will guide your team to focus on eliminating Partner issues and drive a best in class support experience. You and the team will help drive improvements to the product, service and ecosystem by providing the Partner perspective backed up by data, in a well-articulated manner that clearly identifies product, service issues, and the impact of these issues on customer loyalty and satisfaction. You will enable your team to champion and drive proactive Partner centric features into the products and services, with the goal of eliminating and preventing future customer issues.
The successful candidate is a dynamic leader with a track record of leading and transforming organizations to deliver exceptional customer support experiences. This leadership role requires persistence in driving towards goals in the face of adversity, a deep focus on listening to the team needs and supporting the team as they deliver every day, resilience and poise to interact with senior executives across all Partner organizations in stressful situations. Importantly, the successful leader for this role will have a strong track record of building high performing teams with a healthy organizational culture.
Primary Job Functions:
• Lead the Microsoft Partner Network, Cloud Solution Provider or Marketplace organization to deliver world-class support and build a customer obsessed team of deep experts who are highly motivated to deliver industry leading support in every interaction
• Effectively partner across our global organization to support company priorities and delight customers who need support across their remit
• Develop and maintain strong relationships with supportability, quality, delivery excellence and other delivery teams to help influence and drive outcomes with key technical and business leaders within the Azure Engineering Group, One Commercial Partner and other teams like Commerce Engineering Engagement to accelerate customer issue resolution and represent the voice of our most strategic customers
Responsibilities
Empower Partners to Prevent and Resolve their Issues:
• Raise top issues and customer pain points to the appropriate teams to improve self-help opportunities and to drive volume reduction.
• Model for and coach team to share automation, self-help and diagnostic assets with customers and reinforce benefit of Proactive troubleshooting.
Enable teams to Help Partners quickly when they need our expertise
• Drive adoption of CXF through the Customer Expected Behaviors: Communicate Effectively, be Accountable, Resourceful, and Empathetic.
• Utilize outcome-based metrics such as MBR operational measures CSAT, IR% Met, Throughput) to better understand the customer experience and operational health; develop and execute action plans to improve the experiences not meeting customer expectations or areas that do not adhere to operational standards.
• Consistently enable the team to conduct case reviews to maintain case wellness, proactively engaging customers as needed, in support of CXD principles
• Coach team members to leverage knowledge assets, tools, and other resources to resolve customer issues quickly.
• Foster a culture of collaboration within your team; look for opportunities to quickly help those needing collaboration assistance.
• Engage in customer escalations; resolve the concern and look for ways to avoid similar escalations in the future.
Enable the delivery teams to advise Partners on how they can achieve more:
• Identify opportunities to add true value to Partner interactions (with our Partner Center tools and our advocates) that help them grow their business, improve their Partnership with Microsoft, broaden their exposure to Microsoft’s services, or other areas relevant in each interaction.
• Evangelize and drive best practices to improve quality of support experience and faster resolution.
Enable our delivery teams and org to best serve our Partners
• Attract strong talent to the team and ensure a focus on learning to build deep expertise and appropriate breadth in all roles in the organization
• Build and foster a culture of empathy for Partner needs and a tenacious drive for providing impactful solutions that meet the need and deliver value that improves our relationships with Partners
• Deeply analyze support trends and take action on continuous improvement initiatives through strong partnership with quality, delivery, engineering and delivery excellence roles
• Empower self and colleagues to embrace a Growth Mindset, do what’s right for customers, practice boundary-less collaboration, act with courage to do the right things for customers, build trust and work together to achieve shared business goals.
• Regular collaboration and re-use of best practices from other organizations both inside and outside of Partner Enablement for role alignment and continuous learning / infusion of best practices from other SBUs.
• Reinforce the CXF transformation by contributing to the SBU strategy and ensuring adoption of behaviors and capabilities, such as CXD, resulting in increased customer satisfaction
• Model and coach for growth mindset, reward those who demonstrate customer centricity, agility and innovation to achieve customer delight.
• Embrace, advocate, and help deploy the latest engineering solutions that better execution speed and success.
• Enhance your team (collectively and individually) and yourself through leveraging and applying feedback data MSPoll) cultivating development plans for all and making space and time for learning activities.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
• 10+ years of related experience in the customer service industry, product support, technical support, IT Admin support, consulting, systems or product development.
• 5+ years of experience as a people manager
• Role model for growth mindset and a track record of achieving success in both the what and the how
Preferred Qualifications:
• Proven communication skills at the executive level internally and externally
• Proven track record in the management of global service delivery operations
• Foundational technical background in Enterprise technologies and cloud services
• Experience with either the Microsoft Partner Network, Cloud Solution Provider Programs, or Marketplace
• Experience with Partner Center and/or field OCP experience working directly with a Partner or at a Partner directly
• Bachelor's degree in engineering, management, business, or related field or 4 years work experience
Other skills and Competencies
• Communication: Represent Microsoft and communicate with corporate and internal customers via telephone, email, or other electronic means, regarding technically complex issues with Microsoft software products. Be able to logically and accurate communicate to various levels (Engineers to Business Owner and Executive). Lead and recovery situations with customers.
• Customer focus: Ability to put customer first, lead and prioritize work to deliver great customer experiences. Maintains focus on the customer experience when balancing short- and long-term decisions.
• Collaboration: Communicates with individuals from other teams or organizations and listens carefully to how they perceive mutual issues or opportunities
• Influence for impact: Listens for the priorities and concerns of others and acknowledges differing perspectives.
• Adaptability: Actively seeks information and tests assumptions; shifts his or her approach in response to the demands of a changing situation.
• Judgment: Scopes problems by identifying key issues, inputs, stakeholders, and outcomes.
• Creative Problem Solving: Solves abstract problems by considering the environment and applying original thought.
• Drive for results: Sets clear and challenging goals for a portfolio of work, and pursues them with enthusiasm and passion
• Demonstrated experience/ability in leading both direct and virtual teams with a broad array of skills to ensure best-in-class customer outcomes.
• Ability to create effective relationships, listen, communicate, influence, be persistent, patient and collaborate cross-team at all organizational levels
• Brings passion and energy to create a vibrant culture of diversity and inclusion within their organization.
