Customer Service & Support
• Do you want to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more?
• Do you want to work in an open and inclusive environment where diverse perspectives are celebrated?
• If you love talking to and learning from customers and are excited about working with brilliant technical minds, we want to talk to you.
In Customer Service and Support, we are focused on how we can Empower, Help, and Advise Microsoft customers. We engage in solving complex problems for customers, we collaborate and knowledge share with each other, and we innovate on solutions to enable our customers to make the most of Microsoft products.
Our team is geographically distributed, we speak many languages and we come from a variety of cultural backgrounds. We are rapidly expanding, and we are looking for talented people with a passion for solving complex issues and an obsession for customer happiness.
Our culture is built around attributes that drive our every decision and our every action:
• Customer Obsession - we exist for and because of the customer. We need people who share that passion and drive to make our customers experiences easy, insightful and trusted.
• Growth Mindset - we value all perspectives and reward individuals that poke at the edges of what they know to be true. We are seeking people that think differently and are biased toward action to accomplish great things.
• Diverse & Inclusive - we enable people who bring a contemporary view to shape our internal teams and encourage all to feel included.
• One Microsoft - we collaborate and value the work of others, combining their learnings with our own to make a better outcome for our customers.
• Making a difference - we drive impact by looking for ways to continually improve our day to day responsibilities and the connections between our work and others.
Do you have a passion for ensuring our employees have access to the right knowledge at the right time to delight our partners? Do you enjoy learning about the latest releases around Microsoft products, services & programs? Are you adept at managing complex programs while driving results in a global cross-organizational environment? If so, you may be the right candidate for a role driving the strategy & execution of the readiness portfolio support professionals in the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization.
Microsoft Customer Service & Support delivers 11 Billion customer interactions a year including phone, online, email, and chat across the entire portfolio of Microsoft products and services. In this fast-paced environment, support professionals are expected to understand their customer’s needs, solve their problems, exceed customer expectations by preventing issues and teaching customers to get the most from the technologies they use.
The ideal candidate is a highly-motivated, experienced program manager with proven experience contributing to the strategy and delivering results in a global environment with a complex array of stakeholders. The ideal candidate also has strong knowledge in the learning & development profession including proven experience designing, developing, launching and landing readiness in a highly matrixed, global environment. The economics of our business require strong innovation in readiness programs to deliver effective learning that has the desired impact. There will need to be a heavy focus on blended learning in all readiness plans with continuous improvement and inspection to improve effectiveness.
Responsibilities
As a Learning Business Program Manager (BPM), you will serve as a strategic trusted business advisor to Customer Service leadership – providing readiness program strategy, program design and execution to support and grow our Partner satisfaction. You will partner with CSS Worldwide Learning, Microsoft Program owners, Engineering and Business Units to land an aligned and integrated readiness approach in support of enhancing the partner experience with our first-touch agents. This will include a clear readiness lifecycle model, H1/H2 readiness planning with alignment to global service delivery rhythms, as well as an established cadence for communications, business insight identification, and readiness to business impact scorecard reporting. This role offers a unique career development opportunity, and is envisioned to be a growth assignment for rising leaders.
The Learning Program Manager will become the expert on our readiness team in understanding the different types of support professionals, the business goals we are driving, the partner base and their needs and use that information to create world-class readiness plans. Once plans are developed, the Learning Program Manager will be accountable and responsible for all aspects of execution across the readiness lifecycle in strong collaboration with learning & development resources, SMEs, and other stakeholders.
This role requires significant working hours flexibility including hours that overlap with the Seattle time zone (UTC-8). All applicants must have the desire and ability to work until 12:00pm Seattle time, Monday-Thursday, as required by the role.
Key Responsibilities:
• Stakeholder Engagement & Planning: Work with a variety of business and delivery stakeholders to understand the business & sales strategy and lead the readiness plans in support of business goals
• Comprehensive Training Development: Execute on the readiness plan by either building training yourself or, when business funds exist and scale is needed, leverage vendor resources to build training using the modern modalities and designs for efficiency and effectiveness in a distributed environment
• Continuous Improvement: Once launched, monitor the training effectiveness for constant improvement to the training development and share those findings across the entire team. Improvements should also be strategic in nature that can impact the entire portfolio of readiness across the organization.
• Standardize Readiness Development: Partner with the readiness organization to set standards for releases including modalities, templates, design criteria, delivery models and any other areas as necessary to ensure efficient development of readiness that meets business needs
Qualifications
• Strong program management skills across a broad portfolio of projects and strategic initiatives
• Global experience managing diverse virtual teams without direct authority
• Experience in training development including scoping, content creation, delivery and landing
• Strong experience in online and e-learning training development preferred
• Strong communications skills, executive presence and experience presenting to leadership
• Proven experience in quickly ramping in new domain areas and keeping up with the pace of change
• Ability to deal with ambiguity and complex, matrixed environments with minimal oversight
• Strongly prefer experience with a support organization including supplier agents and call centers
• Bachelor’s Degree required and Master’s Degree preferred
Specific Qualifications:
• 7+ years’ experience delivering large program, project and readiness efforts, executing readiness strategies and frameworks, defining readiness/project/program plans and executing on those plans to deliver business results.
• 7+ years of product marketing, campaign marketing, and/or sales management or training experience
• 3+ years’ experience in a support or services related role.
• Experience with programs support including but not limited to Premier, Partner programs, Volume Licensing, Billing preferred
• Experience in account management or sales roles preferred
• Proven communication skills and ability to effectively influence colleagues and management.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver results, meeting and exceeding expectations.
• Skills in problem resolution, team building, negotiation, dealing with ambiguity, establishment of effective processes, tracking results and support systems.
Skills & Knowledge
• Self-starter business driver
• Excellent communications skills, executive presence, and strong business acumen
• Proven cross boundary collaboration capability
• Established project and program management fundamentals
• Demonstrated analytical problem solving with an ability to manage through ambiguity
• Ability to work independently and effectively as part of a remote team
• Ability to drive successful outcomes with Worldwide virtual teams
• Proven people and program management experience – both FTE and vendor
• Familiarity with Microsoft offerings (products and cloud services), processes, and tools
• Estimated up to 25% travel required (including international)
