Support as a Service provides the following:
All "core" support infrastructure
For efficiency and consistency, all of the common capabilities that power the many support experiences across Microsoft, regardless of product or customer persona, will be built once, as a set of services. Those common capabilities include: case management, customer & support agent communications, community, real-time notifications, and diagnostics.
The “foundational” customer and support agent experiences
Extensibility where needed
In order to provide the best support experience to our customers, product groups must be able to seamlessly integrate support experiences into their products. Just like the Ibiza support portal in Azure looks and feels like part of Azure but is powered by the core support services, so too should a team be able to tweak the community UX to look and feel like their product but not have to build the core community capabilities itself. Likewise, product groups know the most about their products and each customer’s context within their products and so must be able to extend the agent toolset to enable them to solve their specific product issues. MSEG will provide those extensibility points in a way that is powerful enough for partners to leverage the core support capabilities, while ensuring that customers get a consistent experience – both inter- and intra-product. Regardless of the product or service the customer came through, they should recognize that they are getting support from Microsoft. For example, the contact support experience on office.com should be the same as on support.microsoft.com, and the process of creating a support incident on Azure’s portal should be the same as on the Business Customer Portal.
The Support Data Platform
Data is the foundation of Support as a Service. Optimizing the support funnel requires that we’re zealous about emitting and consuming data at the right places and times throughout the system and throughout our products. Automation of data flow, data quality, modeling and machine learning are all table stakes for this endeavor. These systems and the data they work on are at the heart of Support as a Service. In addition, we will expose a standard set of data streams and business insights so that CSS and product teams can develop and enrich their own understanding of what is going on in MSF. To be clear, there will be a bi-directional flow of data between the Support Data Platform and the product groups. Data we take in from product groups along with deep customer insights like their previous support incidents, their licensed products, and their info from the customer feedback channels will help power the system overall. Data we emit to the product groups will power their insights and help them understand what actions they need to take to help optimize the MSF.
The picture below provides a high level view of what Support as a Service looks like. The key takeaways from this picture should be: 1) all of the core capabilities in Support as a Service are made available via APIs, 2) all of the foundational experiences are built on those APIs, 3) both customer and agent experiences can be extended via leveraging those same APIs, and 4) it is all tied together via single data platform that heavily leverages Jarvis, Asimov and Cosmos.
