Tag: CPE

Categories
Uncategorized

What I do at Microsoft: It’s all about the customer

I was asked yesterday, “what the heck do you do at Microsoft these days?” That was a follow up to a friend seeing a post in Computerworld that I’d missed, which was interesting as I was calling out the importance of numbers in names… as I have one in mine (hence the emoticon, which Gregg Keizer neglected to note in his post).

But back to what I do.

As I wrote here, many people in our offices focus on the work to make and keep customer satisfaction a top priority, especially important now more than ever. That’s a positive. Steve Ballmer said previously that Microsoft has more work to do to please our customers and partners, noting that “we’ve only begun to tap the real potential of computers to help you communicate, find answers, solve problems and be more productive.”

At Microsoft, I have the privilege to coordinate and support the work our product and services teams do (our business groups, aka BGs) as they focus on improving satisfaction with our customers and partners. We call this “CPE” at the company, and you can read a little more about it here.

Along with a small group focused on the BGs, and with a great team of people in our worldwide Sales & Marketing team, we help frame and prioritize issues, make connections across teams (challenging when you have as many people around the world as we do, serving so many customers) and improve upon the customer’s experience with Microsoft. This isn’t done in a vacuum, and I get to work with our talented and dedicated product and services teams to provide guidance and work with teams when needed, and sometimes actively engaging on issues. For me, that includes evangelizing best practices, identifying and resolving broad issues, and working on broad, cross company efforts (most often technical in nature, as I’ve documented on this blog).

In short, rule #1 about my job in CPE is about making our customers happy, and for ones that are happy, keeping them happy. For ones who run into an issue or have a problem with products and services, it’s about referring to rule #1 and working with teams to make them happy.

As I wrote here, fools may find fault with ease. It takes the persistent to note that the customer experience isn’t a commodity, and to course correct when we find fault…

Benjamin Franklin and Dale Carnegie both said that “any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain – and most fools do.” But if you listen to the criticism and respond to it — take the criticism and do something positive with it — then you can course correct and improve the customer experience.

With that, I’m off to course correct. And offer some advice.

Bookmark this on Delicious Bookmark and Share

Also available via https://t.co/LumQc302KN

Categories
Uncategorized

Satya Nadella: the new president in Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business

News today: we have a new president in the Server & Tools Business: Satya Nadella, a respected technical leader here at the company (as noted here: http://bit.ly/i5ovIb). Satya moved from MBS to the Online Services Division to head up the engineering division there, which includes Bing, MSN and AdCenter (our advertising platform).

Satya Nadella hasn’t blogged in quite a while – I’ll suggest that he pick this back up ;)  You can check out his old posts at http://bit.ly/iejhvy. In particular I enjoyed one of his last posts on “making complex things simple” mantra, with observations from the book "The Laws of Simplicity" by John Maeda…

"I recently read The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. He has a cool web site as well. In the Dynamics group there is a lot of passion around this subject.

"John’s first rule – REDUCE: Simplicity through thoughtful reduction…strikes me as the most critical, when it comes to software design.

"I remember going to for my first meeting with the technical team at Navision before the acquisition. Their entire presentation was around how little code they have in their application. Mind you this was before we had settled on price!!

"This spirit of “minimalism” has helped us a ton as we have looked to evolve our apps and make them modern both in terms of user experience, runtime infrastructure and design time tools."

This reminds me of another discussion: Tony Scott, our CIO, asked Steve Ballmer (as noted on the Microsoft CIO Network site) about the biggest lessons he has learned over the ten years Steve has been CEO.

"… there’s a quote from a college basketball coach who just died here in the U.S., a guy named John Wooden, who was the coach at UCLA for many years.  But his writing on this sort of stands out to me.  He used to tell his players, "Be quick, but don’t hurry."  In our business more than any, you’ve got to be quick, but don’t hurry.  You can hurry things and you get a bad outcome if you try to rush, rush, either half-baked, not forward-looking enough.  But if you just take your time, you’re slow, you’re not in the market, you’re going to fail too.  And so really being thoughtful about — it doesn’t mean — there’s no implied algorithm of how you be quick but don’t hurry, but I know that a lot of the bad decisions I made, I made when I did hurry or when I took too much time to make a decision.  One or the other.  And so those are sort of my principles that I’ve learned.  I mean, I can also tell you I’ve learned a lot of things from specific projects."

 

Tags: announcements, Microsoft, Windows Server.

Delicious Bookmark this on Delicious Bookmark and Share

Also available via http://bit.ly/hXrbf5

Categories
Uncategorized

Your questions: What the heck are you doing at Microsoft and what is CPE?

I was asked today: "just what are you doing at Microsoft these days? And what is this CPE thing I read about"

More of the same actually, as I originally noted here. (As well as this humourous look.)

In short, I work with product and services groups across the company to improve satisfaction with our customers and partners.  These customer-focus efforts are some of key tenets of our work that we refer to inside Microsoft (in both the business groups and SMSG) as the Customer and Partner Experience (aka CPE, another $MSFT TLA). More on the work we do at Microsoft to improve the Customer & Partner Experience – or CPE at the company – can be found in this Executive Summary and in my succinct post here.

Related to CPE is the work we do on the Microsoft GRS.

Uh oh, another Microsoft three letter acronym (TLA ;).

Every year, Microsoft turns to the Microsoft Global Relationship Study (GRS) to better understand the customer satisfaction our customers and partners though their thoughts, concerns and ideas. Their feedback has helped increase our understanding of their business needs, improve our products, and make it easier for them to do business with us. We focus on the results of the survey (and other research, such as product satisfaction) and make key changes. More information available at http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/grs/default.aspx.

And as Eric noted in his post, Microsoft also has many sites available "to share your experiences and connect with Microsoft to find solutions, learn about resources and much more." Here are a few:

 

Subscribe to this blog

Tags: misc, CPE, Microsoft, Windows 7, customer satisfaction.

Delicious Bookmark this on Delicious Bookmark and Share

Also available via http://bit.ly/hKvFTM

Categories
Uncategorized

Being foolish about customer and partner satisfaction at Microsoft

I recalled tonight an old quote: Fortuna favet fatuis.  If you know me, you’ll likely understand my personal, off-hours affinity for such a quote and my penchant for Monty Python humour.

Clip art from Microsoft Office Online But in all seriousness, I’m reminded of a past post in which I noted that fools may find fault with ease. It takes the persistent to note that the customer experience isn’t a commodity, and to course correct when we find fault…

Benjamin Franklin and Dale Carnegie both said that “any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain – and most fools do.” But if you listen to the criticism and respond to it — take the criticism and do something positive with it — then you can course correct and improve the customer experience.

So, what the heck does this have to do with anything?

These days, I hear many people at the office talking about how they’re working to keep Customer and Partner Experience (CPE) a top priority, especially important now more than ever.  That’s a positive.  Steve Ballmer said previously that Microsoft has more work to do to please our customers and partners, noting that “we’ve only begun to tap the real potential of computers to help you communicate, find answers, solve problems and be more productive.”

When you’re thinking about new products and services, one of the pieces of advice I offer is to think about course correcting wherever needed and whenever you should. Question the wisdom of others when it’s particularly foolish. Thinking for a moment of the Motley Fool’s description for where they came up with the namesake…

“The Motley Fool’s name comes directly from the beginning of Act II, scene vii of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In the days when Shakespeare was writing about kings, Fools were the merry fellows paid to entertain the king and queen, using self-effacing humor that instructed as it amused. In fact, Fools were the only members of their societies who could tell the truth to the king or queen without having their heads rather abruptly removed from their shoulders.

“In Fooldom, readers like you are the royalty.”

Taking the Motley Fool’s advice to heart, your customers and partners are the royalty, and it’s your job to do our best to find answers, solve problems, tell the truth, and don’t settle for anything less than what your customers and partners deserve. And…

“… use whatever you may learn for good rather than evil, and that you pass your Foolishness on to others who may need help. If a fellow Fool is stumped by a question you know you can answer, we hope you’ll consider lending them a hand.”

If you think that something doesn’t make sense from their perspective, fix it.

Be foolish. (But respectful, of course. 😉

Tags: articles, what I read, blogs, Customer service.

 

Bookmark this on DeliciousBookmark and Share

This post is also available via https://aka.ms/foolish

 

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Speak Your Mind: Dynamics hears the voice of the customer, with video, too

As I posted yesterday in Hearing the voice of the customer- learning how to listen and respond, I reflected that sometimes it’s more difficult for larger, more complex and diverse companies to nimbly listen and respond.  And it seems that as you get larger and more global, it is a challenge to continue to inject customer service into the DNA of the organization. 

What’s amazing to me is how in touch many of the exec at Microsoft are with the voice of the customer, and how they keep in touch with that feedback.  Some of it through direct emails sent to execs, feedback from enterprise customers and MVPs,

imageOne interesting way that one of our teams has made the voice of the customer (aka “VOC” or “VOTC” around campus) is through the efforts captured by the Dynamics CPE team. 

At the Dynamics Convergence Conference last year, the team had installed “Speak Your Mind” booths in the Convention Center to capture real customer and partner feedback on video. (Note that the team just returned from the latest latest Convergence held in Orlando.) 

Similar in concept to the infamous Rogers Cable Speakers’ Corner booth (my Canuck friends will no doubt recall, and hat’s off to friends/readers at Rogers), imagine if you will a computerized video photo booth…  In this case, all you had to do to leave feedback for Rogers was to step into the Speakers’ Corner, push the green button and to speak your mind.  With this, people could stand on a proverbial soapbox, give live performances (as the Barenaked Ladies did early in their career, as legend has it) and espouse their personal and political views, all from the comfort of a space not much larger than a phone booth. 

Well, as went the early makings of reality television, so goes Microsoft with Speak Your Mind…

imageSpeak Your Mind – This is your opportunity to provide your feedback in the first person. Tell us about the features, the functionality, the integration, the upgrade, the Implementation—whatever is on your mind as we are ready to listen. Go ahead and Speak Your Mind.

Partners and customers that attended Convergence were invited to step into the Speak Your Mind booth, as Infoworld covered in an article last year.  In the booth, they were encouraged to provide direct feedback to the Dynamics team (and sometimes feedback on other products) to “help drive changes for future product releases and service plans,” according to the info on the Dynamics site.  In their coverage on the page “Speak Your Mind Videos Put to Good Use“, Norma Smith (featured at right) said in a blog post last summer that the feedback is heard, and put to good use: 

“Well, I’m pleased to tell you that A LOT has happened to these 1200+ videos.  Here’s the scoop.  Within  about four weeks after Convergence these feedback videos had been individually reviewed and posted to a keyword-searchable internal site accessible only by Microsoft team members. 

“Now here’s the cool part.  As of May 31st, five weeks after initial posting, MBS team members have watched over 2,000 Speak Your Mind videos.  Collectively, that’s a lot of knowledge and a lot of insight getting into the hands of the folks who can influence change.  The videos are being incorporated into strategy planning, product reviews, etc. 

“Our Technical Support teams have taken the videos quite seriously and really gone the extra mile.  I’ve heard about a few cases where a Dynamics customer has received a personal phone call from Support – wherein the Dynamics Support Engineer identified him/herself, advised them that they had heard about their product concerns from the Speak Your Mind video, and then proceeded to show them how to resolve the issue.  Proactive outreach from Support.  Super happy customer.”

Many managers and executives in customer service, product development, marketing and sales have heard and seen the feedback and read transcriptions of the videos to help the division improve on our products and services.  It’s one way that we take customer comments to scale and make them accessible to employees in the company.

Tags: Microsoft, Dynamics, customer support, Rogers, feedback, customer service, Norma Smith.