Music Journalist
I worked with the director of CSEO to understand customer success. This team was a sales team that worked on managing relationships with enterprise customers on existing product use. If a customer was say Starbucks and Starbucks is managing 10 accounts over 5 regions that all manage a number of physical starbucks retail stores and each store in consuming a numner of seats of the microsoft office product, this team ensures every seat that is being paid for in this account chain is actually being used. There are some enterprise customers with large accounts who have too mant unused seats or credits in cloud services like azure or other customers who do not have enough seats and have a bunch of service requewst tickets asking for more seats.
I spent a significant amount of time speaking with customer account managers to learn about the process of managing accounts and reading customer success stories to learn about how companies are currently using specifically the azure cloud services along with other Microsoft bundles to improve their business operations. Those stories are open to the public and you can read them here:
https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/home?sq=&ff=&p=0
Because Microsoft as a company has a large B2B product offering, ensuring that the companies who use Microsoft products and services know how the products work and are able to solve their business needs is critical to the business function. This is the purpose of the customer success department and role.
After joining the team I spent the first few months writing a document filled with recommendations on how to improve the customer success feedback channel from account examination to a meeting with the account manager. There was an entire team of senior program managers working on a product which would track a customer relation concern to the product team (ex: Microsoft Office) and put the customer in a funnel to understand the problem at hand and ensure the technical support representative was able to contact the individual and provide meaningful feedback.
Other program managers working in Azure, Office and the executive suite. I also spent some time chatting with the data engineering team about account management given duplication was a huge problem with no current solution.
I didn’t understand the purpose of such a large sales department in a company like Microsoft and the tier of customer who uses the product.
What technology or tools did I use?
Internal Directory tool to find product owners working things pertinent to what I was working on and attend particular meetings
Documentation and meeting notes. There were nt formal meeting notes for many of the prior meetings and to there was a lot of duplication of work. There was a team of designers working on the customer success ticket project but they were duplicating a design study that had been completed 2 years prior but could not find the documentation of the work given new deisngers had come on board and old designer left. I had to dig in that internal directory and find designer who moved into other organizations in the company to find the old design documents and bring them into the conversation about the current process.
The ticketing system (customer success was launched). A new customer success director came on board and sort of overhauled the leadership team working on customer success so a lot of thigns changed.
This role was about a chain of command and communication. It was primarily concerned with attending meetings and understanding who was responsible for doing what. At my level I didn’t really have any say so with regard to decision making but I did have a lot of information to pass from one stakeholder to another. I became really effective at communicating via email succinctly.
Exploring program management is important. It’s very specific to the program that you are working on and understanding the needs of that program.