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With everyone working from home, sometimes you just need to talk to someone.
“I like to talk to people,” says Andrea Arce, an agent on the Microsoft Helpdesk charged with keeping Microsoft running one phone call and chat at a time. “I like to have a conversation with them while I solve their problems.”
Like everyone at Microsoft, the Helpdesk technicians who troubleshoot the technical challenges of the company’s 156,000 employees were also asked to work from home to help the company respond to the COVID-19 crisis.
Microsoft employees used to be too busy to chat with Arce, who typically worked out of a large contact center in Costa Rica. “They were always on the go, multitasking while they waited for me to help them,” she says.
Not anymore.
Everything changed when remote working started. Like people everywhere, suddenly isolated employees needed someone to talk to, even if it was simply to make sure the person on the other end of the line was OK.
“I’ve been travelling around the world just by talking to people,” Arce says. “I’ve heard about supply chain challenges in China. I’ve heard how beautiful Slovakia is. I was told that I just have to visit Denmark. People are telling me stories about their countries and it’s making me feel as if I’m not as stuck as I am working from home.”
The same goes for David Rodriguez-Jenkins, who went from helping Microsoft employees solve technology challenges at a walk-in Tech Link center at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to helping employees overcome challenges with their technology over the phone and via chat from his newly assembled home office.
“It now means so much more when you do something right, when you fix their problem,” Rodriguez-Jenkins says. “If someone’s computer isn’t working, they literally can’t do their jobs. Their PC is their lifeline to their job and to Microsoft—it’s their connection to the outside world.”
[Here’s how Microsoft is enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft. Read how Microsoft is reinventing the experience its employees have at work.]
Transformation fueled by crisis
Leading up to the COVID-19 crisis, Microsoft’s Helpdesk was well established. It had contact centers where employees could reach agents like Arce via calls or chat. It had walk-in Tech Link centers where employees could bring in their device and get immediate, in-person help from technicians like Rodriguez-Jenkins. IT pros were assigned to each building, ready to leap into action if a meeting room stopped working.
Suddenly, that well-oiled machine was disrupted.
“We prepared for a lot of things, but we never thought that we would ever need to send everyone home,” says Silvina Olkies, a senior director for End User Support in Microsoft’s Digital that leads the company’s helpdesk team. “There have been many challenges—helping our employees stay productive working from home at exactly the same time we were asking our entire helpdesk team to start working from home really pushed us, but in a good way.”
Olkies thinks of the shift to remote working as an opportunity for rapid digital transformation.
“We have 600 agents working at five different contact centers around the world,” she says. “We were able to move them to working from home in just a couple of days. We have 400 Tech Link technicians who were used to working with people in person at our offices all around the world—we were able to seamlessly add them to our contact center platform and have them start taking helpdesk calls and chats from their home offices.”
It wasn’t without bumps, but the transition went well and happened fast because the team has been working to overhaul its helpdesk model, Olkies says.
“Because of our all-in-one cloud-based contact center platform, Genesys built on Microsoft Azure, it was fairly easy for our team to take their laptops home and take calls and chats there,” she says. “Our system for automated routing and call and chat distribution works just as easily from home as from the contact centers.”
As for shouting across the contact center cubicles to ask a friend to help solve a sticky problem?
“We now do that in Microsoft Teams,” Olkies says. “We have channels for each topic area—we’re actually benefiting from this because we’re recording our institutional knowledge in a logical, easily findable way.”
Arce says typing a question into a Microsoft Teams channel helps her get timely answers from subject matter experts around the globe.
“Everyone starts pitching in on questions,” she says, adding that their responses become part of a group-think solution on that issue. “You start to build up a record of things that worked or didn’t work. That’s something that didn’t exist before—I hope it stays with us.”
Olkies says the lessons learned during remote working will indeed be carried forward as the organization comes out of this crisis and continues to deliver support and enable productivity across Microsoft.
Enabling remote connectivity
When Microsoft employees were asked to start working from home, Helpdesk tickets surged, with most asking for help with Remote Access or dealing with passwords and authentication issues.
“At the beginning, many people didn’t have phone authentication set up because they had never needed to use it before,” says Olkies, adding that access to sensitive information via virtual private networks (VPN) was also an early issue. “Some people didn’t have VPN set up properly. Some people needed help resetting passwords.”
After people got their systems set up, VPN and authentication issues began to fall off, replaced by more typical requests and for help with new services that were being deployed.
“It’s always a mix,” Olkies says. “We’re past our initial surge and more back to what feels like normal—if having everyone working from home can be considered normal.”
Contact centers experienced a volume increase of over 40 percent, but because most offices have been closed and employees are encouraged to work from home, Tech Link technicians like Rodriguez-Jenkins have been assisting users remotely. “Since employees can’t walk into a Tech Link, we’re right at the level I would expect,” Olkies says.
For Arce, the calls and chats she gets also reflect how things have settled down now that employees are more firmly established in their home offices.
“Now it’s calls about internet connection troubles, low bandwidth, that kind of thing,” she says. “And we’re really steady with VPN.”
As a VPN specialist, Rodriguez-Jenkins agreed.
“I like to call myself the MSFT VPN master, which is super nerdy in itself,” he says. “I don’t know why, but it just clicked with me—that’s why I tend to get a lot of tickets for setting up and troubleshooting remote access.”
Moving from helping people in person to helping them remotely hasn’t diminished his impact, for which he is thankful.
“On my first day, I had this one client—it was another VPN issue,” Rodriguez-Jenkins says. “She just couldn’t connect her VPN.”
The solution was simple—he was able to solve it in three quick steps.
“She was so grateful,” he says. “I have never felt more useful. I felt so accomplished doing such a simple task for somebody. I know it sounds so small, but it was such an important moment for me, being able to help someone when I wasn’t there in person.”
Getting it right mattered because of how important it is for us all to be able to work remotely successfully, but it also mattered personally for Rodriguez-Jenkins.
“I’m actually a person who has an immune disorder, a genetic disorder,” he says. “I’m one of the vulnerable ones who has to watch out for this—I have to be very careful with everything I do. That’s why it’s so important for us to do everything we can to help people solve their tech problems remotely. Everything that Microsoft is doing to expand remote working is saving lives. It’s making a difference. As someone who relies on safer practices, I appreciate that.”
Here’s how Microsoft is enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft.
Read how Microsoft is reinventing the experience its employees have at work.
