Microsoft’s Tectonic Shift from Being Product-Driven to Experience-Driven
Even for those who remember 1980, it’s easy to forget how daring the vision was.
At a time when computers were impenetrable calculators inside science labs, or colorful contraptions from science fiction, there was Bill Gates. At 25 years old, he set out to redefine what was possible – prophesying that there would be “a computer on every desk and in every home.”
Forty years later, that audacious idea is now a ubiquitous part of life. Microsoft established the vision, then made it our reality. With that, a novel problem manifests. What does a company do once it has fulfilled its purpose?
Ctrl+Shift+F5 – in other words: a force refresh.
And so when Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, he put forth a new purpose – one equally vast in ambition. Now Microsoft’s mission is “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
A litany of strategic decisions soon followed. A sharp pivot into cloud-based technologies, major updates to its core products, and betting big on the gaming industry. Microsoft’s latest product innovations are hard to ignore.
Even more inspiring, however, is the company’s new focus on empowering the customer.
Microsoft is becoming more than a tech leader. More than a $684 billion juggernaut. More than the third most valuable brand in the world. Microsoft is once again the daring company determined to upend the status quo and redefine what is possible.
Central to this transformation: the Microsoft USA Customer Experience Center, led by US CMO Grad Conn.
Microsoft’s Big Bet on Social Media
Grad Conn had long been operating ahead of the digital learning curve. He joined Microsoft in 2006 and launched the first Microsoft Cloud product – back when cloud meant something entirely different.
An early-adopter of social personally, and now professionally, he could see that widespread adoption was inevitable. “I knew social media would forever change the relationship between consumers and brands,” he says. “Suddenly consumers could talk back. And they could talk to one another with more reach, authenticity, and influence than most companies."
While most executives were still wary of social, Grad wanted to lean into it. When he became US CMO in 2011, he made it his first mandate.
“Most of us have license plate frames that say: ‘Microsoft. Changing the world.’ People in this company truly and deeply believe that we are changing the world, changing how humans interact with each other, and changing the very possibilities of our planet for the better.”
“Social media allows us to show the world who we really are at Microsoft.”
A Bold Vision Requires a Bold Approach to Technology
Social is a colossal opportunity, but when left unguarded, it can become a colossal nightmare. The conversation can easily get away from you. For a company of Microsoft’s size – 165,000 employees serving more than 1.5 billion customers worldwide – it’s millions of conversations that could go wrong.
All too typically, large companies have a tendency to dole out millions of dollars, quickly set up a social media group, and then, in Grad’s parlance, “bolt it on.”
“And that’s exactly what I didn’t want – and couldn’t do – if social was going to work for Microsoft,” Grad explains. “When you do that, you’re setting yourself up for failure or, at best, internal indifference. Without integration, there’s no accountability, and without accountability, there’s no progress, no growth.”
A determination to see social as not merely another channel, but as a way of actually operating and going to market was therefore top of mind when scouting for a tech partner. Agile, future-leaning, and purpose-built for experience – the platform had to deliver on all counts.
Investing in a Platform Purpose-Built for Customer Experience Management
“People often ask us why we chose Sprinklr. My simple answer is that we couldn’t not choose Sprinklr," Grad says.
Sprinklr was only two years old at that point – and there were more established social media management solutions in the space. But, as Grad noticed, Sprinklr was the only platform expressly architected for the enterprise. That distinction would prove key.
"Sprinklr is the only social platform which is 100% focused on the enterprise space. They had a maturity about integrating with a complex, existing MarTech stack that no one else could match – or even understand.”
The second most important attribute: Sprinklr’s codebase. “The way I tell people about the Sprinklr development methodology is that when Sprinklr buys a new company, it shuts it down, takes the IP and the people, and then works with them to effectively rebuild that technology on the Sprinklr platform. Everything stems from one singular codebase.”
By contrast, most (if not all) other vendors tend to frankenstein together acquired technology, he points out. That’s fine in the short term, but cancerous in the long term. “Nothing ever fits together. You can't have a common customer ID. And you effectively stick your customers in a bunch of silos without any hope of having a consistent, holistic interaction methodology.”
Pressing Reset on Marketing – Introducing the Customer Experience Center
Before partnering with Sprinklr, Microsoft struggled with its own version of that problem. Different teams were tackling social from within disparate silos, using different point solutions, and operating natively in each channel.
“It was very, very disconnected, and, frankly, nobody knew what each other was doing. So it was a very, very different way of doing things,” says Director of Integrated Marketing Katrina Munsell. The various teams were, as she concedes, flirting with disaster.
A big reset was due.
“We had to get everyone to commit to being on the same page,” Grad says. And so, in addition to partnering with Sprinklr, they also pioneered Microsoft’s Customer Experience Center – ”a vision of social as a force that would drive the business in a strategic, disciplined, and secure way.”
A considerable amount of internal alignment, explanation, and discussion would prove necessary to win support for centralizing all social media activities. But nothing less could bring an end to various groups “running their own social media adventure.”
With a cross-functional commitment to becoming one brand on social, Grad and team started building the prototype. The first brand running on Sprinklr – and the team’s first victory – would be Lync, an aptly-named instant messaging service that was part of the Office family.
Given that Lync was a Microsoft brand “willing to take some risks,” Grad and his team used it to introduce his broader social vision, building it out through Sprinklr and working hard to engage with its users in what proved to be a successful pilot. Here was a concrete example of what good looks like. From there came Excel. The entire suite of Office products would follow – as would, eventually, nearly every other brand across the Microsoft universe.
With Sprinklr and the Customer Experience Center in place, the days of Microsoft marketers going rogue on social came to a close. Today, there are 29 different brands working together on the same platform. “We've come a long way,” Katrina says. “Now everybody is aggregated on Sprinklr and it's really allowing us to drive our social agenda in a really consistent, unified way.”
Building a Bridge Between Marketing and Customer Care
In most organizations, there’s a clear line separating marketing and customer care. In one corner of the office, marketers try to draw in new customers. In the other corner, customer care works hard to get customers off the phone.
That could no longer be the reality for Microsoft.
“As we were moving into the cloud, we were becoming more of a service company,” Grad says. “We can no longer just sell a piece of software and wave goodbye. We have to continually make sure the customer is having a good experience.”
That subtle change in mindset would require transformative decisions.
“We get tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of questions and requests for help from customers on a monthly basis.” says Tyler Smith, Program Engineering Manager. “If we're not getting to a customer that same day, we're missing the mark.”
The solution was to, almost literally, build a bridge from marketing to customer care. “We added our care agents to Sprinklr and designed new workflows to facilitate a constant exchange of information between the two functions.”
Sprinklr has enabled Microsoft’s 450-person care team to operate at scale – enabling them to work smarter, better, and, yes, cheaper.
Response times are down by 50%, with XX% of responses delivered within the first hour. Most issues are resolved directly on social – with only XX% of cases requiring phone or email assistance – driving the cost per case down from $6 to $1. And last year alone, the team saved $500,000 in customer service-related costs.
The numbers are astounding – and the qualitative achievements even more so. “We’ve redefined the way care and marketing work together,” Tyler says.
“Having the marketers and the care agents on the same platform has been extremely helpful in making sure that customers get help as quickly as possible. We’re not working like separate and siloed teams, but rather one company trying to help as many people as possible.”
Microsoft’s Customer Experience Center in Action
What happens if you mention the word window? Most likely, Microsoft knows about it. – but not in a dystopian “Big Brother” kind of way.
Each year, Microsoft receives roughly 150 million mentions across social. All of those are processed through a cognitive services machine learning model. This AI-powered “smart” processor can triage millions of messages simultaneously – separating the “I have an issue with my Windows 10” from the “I need to clean the windows in my apartment.”
Three million of those messages are then distributed to Microsoft’s Customer Experience Center, where staffers directly handle about 300,000 messages every single year.
If it’s a public safety issue – the stuff PR nightmares are made of – it’s routed to the Rapid Response Team, which specifically handles highly sensitive messages. “Fortunately, we don't have a lot of those issues, which is really great, but you can't wait until it's too late to implement a proactive workflow like that,” Tyler says.
If it’s a customer service issue, it’s routed instantly to the care team, and resolved in the customer’s preferred channel. “Previously, we didn't have any way of taking all the messages from a single customer, and connecting them together as one care issue,” Tyler adds. “With Sprinklr’s case management, we are able to provide (and report on) an end-to-end resolution for every customer.”
If it’s a general remark or a request, it’s bookmarked for later. “We get a lot of product suggestions. We actually store those suggestions in Sprinklr,” Grad explains. “And when that product feature comes out, we then re-message those people to let them know: ‘You asked for it. I know it took three years, but we got it done, and here it is.’”
Taking things one step further, Microsoft uses these organic customer engagements to propel their advertising campaigns. “We can configure thresholds for increasing a campaign budget, or throttling it down, using earned and owned data that's continuously feeding the platform,” Tyler says. By unifying paid, owned, and earned, Microsoft has seen an XX% increase in ad conversions, while reducing spend by $XXXX.
Building the Customer Experience of the Future – One Innovation at a Time
Next up for Microsoft: working with Sprinklr to disrupt the industry’s reliance on email marketing.
“Think about all the marketing automation systems today – they all do email nurture. So you send an email to 100,000 people and then, based on the responses you get, you send another email to about 30,000 of them,” says Praveen Palepu, Director of Marketing Operations. “I can do the same thing using social.” By this time next year, Microsoft will deploy its social nurture program so that customers automatically receive customized experiences based on their interactions with the brand.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. “When we have a new problem, Sprinklr works with us to co-develop the solutions to meet those needs,” says Praveen. “So as we continue to evolve the way we engage with customers, I’m excited to see what we can co-create with Sprinklr. There’s no limit to what we can do together.”
Sprinklr has given Microsoft – a massive, entrenched technology company – the tools to transform into a customer-centric brand with the nimble agility of a startup. And at the center of it all: extraordinary customer experience. “Social is often looked at as either being on the fringe, or still fairly new and unproven. But with Sprinklr, we’ve been able to prove that social can bolster your efforts across marketing, care, advertising, research, and beyond,” says Tyler. “Sprinklr has been foundational to our ability to deliver the right customer experiences.”
“If I was starting a company from scratch today, I would simply just buy Sprinklr,” Grad enthuses. “I would just sit on the Sprinklr stack, and I may not be able to do everything, but I'd be able to do enough to actually conduct my business.”
