Microsoft has a new support platform for company employees, especially new hires and employees who take new jobs at the company.

Whether developers, salespeople, or marketers, Microsoft employees use a huge number of sophisticated digital tools. Now a team from Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms Microsoft, has made it easier for employees to get help when they encounter new tools.

Called One Front Door, this initiative, built on the Microsoft Azure platform, is designed to eliminate one of the big sources of frustrations for people navigating a new Microsoft role or as a new hire: Ensuring that when they encounter trouble with unfamiliar tools, they can get fast, consistent support.

People don’t have to remember multiple email addresses or websites to get the help they need.

– Pete Sysum, principal IT service operations manager, Microsoft Digital

“We have a lot of different support pathways,” says Pete Sysum, a principal IT service operations manager in Microsoft Digital. “I remember taking a road trip to different subsidiaries. I’d see all these machines with sticky notes that said things like, ‘Go here for support for X. Go here for support for Y. And go here for support with Z.’ This was a real opportunity to streamline the support experience.”

One Front Door’s name indicates its aim to clean that up and offer a unified support hub.

“People don’t have to remember multiple email addresses or websites to get the help they need,” Sysum says. “We’re giving them ‘one front door’ where they can go to get consistent first-touch support.”

One challenge is that Microsoft engineers are simply very good at creating a wide range of useful tools for employees to use in their jobs. But just because a tool exists doesn’t mean it’s immediately effective.

“People say, ‘I built this application, and now I’ve deployed it. What could go wrong?’” says Chris LaValley, a principal program manager with Microsoft whose work bridges field salespeople and IT development. “And then they’re asked to go on to do something else. So, what happens to the user base for this application?”

[Find out how Microsoft uses Dynamics 365 and machine learning to drive efficiencies in finance. Discover how AI-powered chatbots cut the number of support tickets by 20 percent.]

Lots of tools, but where to go for help?

Juan Cardenas remembers what it was like before One Front Door. A 10-year veteran of Microsoft, the business intelligence program manager recalls working in Latin America on new Microsoft initiatives. “We didn’t even have the current Microsoft Sales Experience,” he says. “There was no unified platform to provide insights to our sellers, managers, and leaders. I would build my own data models locally and be my own front-line support.”

Cardenas recalls that there were as many as 150 possible touch points for getting help, such as gaining access to a blocked software tool. “It could really get annoying,” he says with admirable understatement. “Every time something went wrong you had to go to a different place to try to fix it.”

With One Front Door, employees have a single point of entry for guidance on where to find solutions to problems. Employees also can solve for themselves common issues such as gaining access to tools needed for work via a curated self-help knowledge base that uses AI and user keywords to serve up the right guidance. If an immediate answer can’t be found, an employee’s issue is escalated quickly to an appropriate engineer or stakeholder.

Culture change needed

Creating a unified support experience required a cultural shift as well as a technical one. It involved knitting together dozens of teams from across Microsoft so that they could offer employees a unified help experience.

“It really meant being OK about dropping your guard and removing boundaries between organizations,” Cardenas says. “We had 7 to 15 teams involved. It took a very open collaboration between us and our engineering partners to achieve this.”

Once the ball got rolling, One Front Door came together in about three months.

This isn’t just about improving the experience for end users. This effort also frees up time for engineers to spend on work that has a much greater impact.

– Alan Stone, senior technical account capability leader, Microsoft Digital

The benefits were clear almost immediately. “Close to 50 percent of all escalations, every day, can be handled through One Front Door,” Cardenas says. “It’s almost as if you come through a door, raise your hand to say there is a problem, and a concierge is right there to solve it.”

If an issue can’t be remedied immediately, escalation to the correct team takes very little time.

Less time on support, more time on engineering

“From a pure productivity perspective, it just makes life easier for users,” says Alan Stone, a senior technical account capability leader for Microsoft Digital who helped sponsor the One Front Door project. “People don’t need to worry about where they need to go, and when they get to One Front Door, they get a consistent experience. This isn’t just about improving the experience for end users. This effort also frees up time for engineers to spend on work that has a much greater impact.”

With engineering more focused on solving technical problems, and with employees in new roles becoming productive more quickly, cost savings are substantial. Moreover, with issues resolved more quickly, Microsoft’s employees work more productively, with less frustration.

In the near term, Microsoft Digital also intends to offer natural language processing via One Front Door. Japan is a test case for this, where One Front Door has been live with Japanese language translation support since April 2021.

With One Front Door and a unified support experience, Microsoft employees can open a pathway to a more productive work life and simplified support for complex tools.

Find out how Microsoft uses Dynamics 365 and machine learning to drive efficiencies in finance. 

Discover how AI-powered chatbots cut the number of support tickets by 20 percent.