Goals of Support

Microsoft support's primary goal is not to be a profit center, but rather to be a "product enabler" for its customers and partners. After all, Microsoft makes money selling products not services. This is by design and has been a strategic decision since the beginning. The support organization provides both proactive and reactive services that help ensure that customers can deploy Microsoft's large portfolio of products successfully and use them as intended. Its secondary goal is to be a major conduit for feeding customer problems back to product groups so that Microsoft developers can build better products.

Microsoft Sidenote: Chris Peters on Usability Tests

I watched an oral history video of a former Microsoft vice president, Chris Peters. He talked about the early days at Microsoft as one of the first 200 people hired. He mentioned that he did not remember when the usability tests started at Microsoft, just that somewhere along the line, the product teams really started listening to customers.

The way that usability tests work is that Microsoft brings customers into a lab (in the old days, it was just a conference room with a one-way mirror) and observes how the customer interacts with the program. At the beginning, Chris says the attitude was, "No, the customer does not know what he is talking about or doing. The usability team just tested 10 dumb people. Go get another sample." At some point, Microsoft realized it was not the people being tested who were dumb; it was the software application. This respect for the customer interaction still stands today because the usability group is large and continues to expand. See http://www.microsoft.com/usability/faq.htm for more information. This is another great process you might want to adopt to provide feedback on how your customers use your products and what they like and dislike.

The support organization costs Microsoft far more than it collects for paid support programs, and both the revenues and costs are allocated to the company's seven strategic business units (SBUs), giving these product groups a financial incentive to create products that require minimal support. (The SBUs are client, information worker, server and tools, home and entertainment, MSN, business solutions, and mobile and embedded.) The support organization does have a goal of recovering the costs of delivering support to partners, businesses, and governmental organizations through various paid support program fees and a portion of software assurance license revenues. The costs of providing support for end users of the Windows client operating system, Office, and home and gaming products and services are bundled into the product license fees.

Rick Devenuti, the VP of support and services at Microsoft, recently (2005) said this:

During the past few years, customer service and support (CSS) has become an incredible asset for Microsoft. Today, CSS is a global organization providing services to the enterprise, developer, SMS&P, and consumer segments. The organization handles over 100 million customers each year via the Web, phone, and onsite resources, and supports over 170 products in 73 countries in over 30 languages.

As we continue to drive an improved customer and partner experience (CPE), it is more important than ever that we leverage our service and support business to drive value to customers and partners. Customer service (CS) is becoming a critical asset for the company to drive customer satisfaction, with a growing opportunity to drive revenue with linkages to sales, operations, and marketing.

CSS's primary focus is to respond to customer problems and resolve them as quickly and efficiently as possible, a capability known as break/ fix. However, it also has the capability to provide phone-based advisory services to both IT professionals and developers, and to publish resources, such as a searchable knowledge base of problems with known solutions, that help customers solve many problems themselves.