How This Engineering Manager Transformed Customer Support with a Single Button

Sure. Um, Again, just a little bit of macro here, uh, because we do the voice, um, product in Microsoft Teams, voice has an administration portal like every other, uh, workload, we have an administration portal that sits within Microsoft 365 admin portals. So voice is it's, uh, set of tabs left nav, and then we do a bunch of things with voice. The very first thing that wise customers do when they come into Microsoft is, you know, look for numbers. If, if you were coming in, and then you were a 50%, uh, you know, you had an, uh, organization of 50 people, you would look for, you know, 50 numbers, and then you might look for a 1-800 number. So the very first thing that customers do on our portal is search, search for numbers. So when I, you know, Took over the team, you know, search speed was hovering at, you know, about 15 seconds or what have you. But more importantly, if people, if sorry, if customers ran into issues with search or, or number porting, which is another thing that we do, our support was, you know, we'd send them to an email link and say, you know, hey, email this link, and that link, that email went into our service desk, uh, which was our operations, uh, service desk was a wing of our operations that took care of customers. Our customers hated, hated this, this process where. They start their journey in a portal and we give them a link and then their support journey is via email with our services. They said they, they really hate it, so I said, OK, we got to step back a little bit and our operations was really dying because, you know, they can't support through email is, is a nightmare. We have case management systems. We have, uh, DX 365. We have CRM systems all over the place. We could use those. So I said, step back a little bit. How do we integrate case management into the portal so our customers who are on M365 and in the voice portal don't, don't have to leave the portal. So, so what we did was we said, OK, you're in a search journey, you're searching for numbers or you're trying to put numbers, and then you run into an issue. Said, you run into an issue, we put in a get help, get help button in there. That automatically links the customer back to our case management system. So we built a, a CRM-based, uh, dynamics 365-based case management system, and we had the portal pop up a wizard with all the context that the customer has up until that point. And then we built a case out of that via the portal. And the customer had a way to interact and then we launched a little wizard and said the customer could talk to our support desk person from the portal using the wizard and everything that our support service desk did on the back end showed up on the portal. So now our customers have a way of. Continuing their journey and then getting to the state that they want to all through the portal, uh, it was, you know, it took a little bit of back and forth, but I think this was a huge win for our customers. So today we don't have, I, I'll, I'll just explain the, the, the numbers that we saw after that. So we see, we track what are called canceled orders like, you know, somebody comes into our portal and says, you know, they wanna buy numbers and then they're frustrated for some reason and leave our portal. Uh canceled orders dipped by 40% in a couple of weeks after we, we put this, um, uh, uh, you know, integrated wizard into our portal. For me that was, that was huge and then you know, when, once and we tracked that we, we continuously track how our customers are doing that and. The feedback that we get is getting away from this email-based system was, was really good for our customers.

great, great, great, great question. What was true for search was true for all other workloads that we do. We do number porting. We do, um, what is called inventory type change. There is about 4 or 5 operations that our customers were redirected to. Services we had used the experience from search and said we do um you know can we have get help links in every workflow that we have in the portal so today we do search using the wizards as an integrated wizard into the portal we do porting from the from the portal as. As a different wizard because coding is a different workflow that takes multiple days. We do type change number type change. For example, people could customers could buy a conferencing bridge number and say, no, no, no, I want to change it to my 1-800 number or vice versa. There's plenty of operations where customers change their mind after they've got the number. Um, we do, um, like I said, port in port out, um, we do inventory management for them via the, uh, help, for example, you know, um, we have. External uh partners that we integrate with into our, uh, into our systems. When our customers work with external partners, they might bring numbers from external partners into us. So we do all of those operations. So we had used search as a place where we could do other, other operations as well. So everything today is run from the portal via the little wizards that we had there.

understand that. Yeah, so a great question. So, OK, maybe I think thanks for the feedback. We're not only so our. Our goal is to make sure that customers never go to this get help slash wizard, but when I, when I say that the, the, the implication here is when customers start their journey for either searching or porting, we want them to successfully complete within the portal without ever hitting the get help link button as a goal. For this fiscal, we have, we have that 85% of our operations, be it search, our reporting, our number type inventory change, our inventory management, we want 85% of them to successfully complete within the portal on their first strike. That is our primary, primary, primary impetus for working. All of these, the side paths that we're building is just off-ramps in the case, in the event, the 15% cases that don't succeed, these are the off-ramps. So we've built a better off-ramp, but our core is to make sure that. You know they succeed on the portal on their first flight, uh, and then we're doing numerous things and I can go into great detail as to how we're integrating in real time with partners when stock is not available and I can, I can dive

search. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Great question. So, Couple of things. Um, Most searches fail for um two reasons. One is, um, you, uh, you come in as an example. I go in and I say, you know, I'm in, uh, Redmond. I'm in Smamish. I want 4 to 5 or 206 numbers. The search comes back and says, oh no, we don't have 4 to 5 numbers, but we have, you know, Mount Vernon numbers. Are you interested? Most customers say no. 360.

Oh, it is, it is. OK, uh, yeah. Um, that is one reason. The other reason is, um, you know, we take too long, uh, for the search to complete, and then, you know, they're not happy with it. So I'll tell you, hold on, was

Great, great question. So I'll, I'll get it is, it is, uh, it is a combination. I, I would say it's actually more a Microsoft problem, and the reason I say that is. For example, if we knew that a lot of customers were looking for 4 to 5, 206 numbers, it's our job to detect that early. Go to our providers who, you know, a bunch of providers that we telcos that we work with and say, hey, you know, telcos, you know, we're getting these. We'd love to have more of the stock in, in, in place before somebody comes in. So what typically happens is because. Stock is not that easy to come by. Telcos are not very willing to share stock. So what we've done to, to address that specific issue is if a customer wants 45 or 260, and if it's not in our stock, we've built real-time pipeline where we tell the customer, the customer, please hang on. We're working with our providers and you know this process could take a little longer. Typically we want to complete search in 2 to 3 seconds. But this process, because it's real time and then going into the customer can take 1015, sometimes 20 seconds. So we inform the customer saying please hold tight, you know, we're doing certain things to bring you and that has fixed at least 10 to 15% of our, uh, searches where customers are now patient they're told what is happening and then, you know, in real time we bring, uh, um, uh, from the, from, from our, uh, from our providers back to. The other thing that we, the, the second thing that I was telling you why searches were failing is. When we inherited, uh, uh, when I took over the team, search was taking 15 seconds because of the storage mechanisms that we had used. So if you, uh, you know, we, we had built our original product on table source and then we had built all the relational constructs on top of that. That is, you know, and we had built it like that because Azure SQL is not compliant and there was a number of reasons we had chosen that path 5 years ago. We have now since moved on to more modern storage systems, CosmosD being what we're using right now, and our search completes in milliseconds. So what used to take 15 seconds before, now we're able to complete P95s in about 2.8 seconds. Most enterprise admins are, are OK with that kind of. You know, they're not going for one second kind of times because the cost of doing that goes up exponentially and enterprise admins are more tolerant. So this, as long as we tell them, as long as we give them good results, they're more interested in accurate results than very, very fast search speeds. So we said, OK, 2.8 seconds is a reasonable place, and then we've paused it. So those two things, search speed improvements and our ability to go in real time to the providers says. Has brought it up to, you know, uh, is bringing it up to 85. They're still not at 85, by the way. There are a couple things we have to do. They're getting there, they're getting there.