xbox customer support process management...the foundation of process management is in the...

Tuesday, October 14, 2014 jwe v.0.5 Sanitized and used with permission

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Xbox Customer Support Process Management The System of Process Management on the CPR Team

“Sine labore nihil”

Introduction and Purpose ................................................................................................... 1 The Process Management Principle .................................................................................. 2 Our Primary Processes, Secondary Processes, and Our Skill Sets ............................ 3 Primary Process #1: Customer Service Process Stewardship .................................... 4 Primary Process #2: Procedure and Scenario Design and Implementation ............ 9 Primary Process #3: Contact Center Core Process Improvement .......................... 11 Looking Forward: Opportunities for Improvement in Process Management ...... 15

Figure 1. The Process Management Principle ............................................................................... 3 Figure 2. The Process Triangle ...................................................................................................... 5 Figure 3. Interactions for Release Management ............................................................................ 6 Figure 4. The System for Developing Procedures and Standards .................................................... 9 Figure 5. The Procedure Management System ............................................................................. 10 Figure 6. Flowchart of Core Processes with Average Times ......................................................... 12 Figure 7. Example: Probability Plot of Core Process: Solution Search and Delivery ................... 13 Figure 8. Example: Graphic View of Minutes Spent on Core Processes ...................................... 14 Figure 9. New Core Agent Process .............................................................................................. 15 Figure 10. Opportunities for Standardizing Our Procedure Management System ..................... 16

Introduction and Purpose This document is intended to provide an overview of the Xbox Customer Support Process Management activity. At its best, this document will establish a clear identity for the process management activity and describe how it directly supports Microsoft’s bottom line. For new people, it serves as an introduction to the principles, interactions, and skill sets of the process management team. For those teams partnering with us on various projects, it explains our goals, methods, and priorities. This document refers to other organizations and activities within the Change, Process, and Release (CPR) Team, but is primarily about the process management activity. Additionally, this is intended to be a living document to provide a placeholder and initial planning document to identify opportunities to refine our practices and improve our ability to provide Microsoft with an enduring competitive advantage.


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It seemed to be helpful to name as many contributors to the effort as possible to provide future reference for their skills and experiences even though some have found themselves in new organizations and working on new challenges, so some people named may not be available.

It is a well-recognized axiom of quality management that only a standardized process can be improved. Standardization does not have to lock us into methods that don’t serve us; it means that the process goals are understood independently of the work personalities and that there is a documented (at some level) method for achieving the goals and assessing performance.

Like most organizations, this one has sprung up organically according to the insight and vision of organizational leadership and the demands of our customer support mission. This means that some parts of our work are formally defined and correspond to industry best practices; others are informal and dependent on the individuals who accomplish the work to set goals, structure the work, and evaluate results. Some parts of our work are very polished and complete; other parts are in various levels of development natural to a lean high-technology organization.

In all cases, it is assumed that this organization is perfectly structured to achieve the results it is currently achieving – and if we want it to achieve something more, this document provides a point of departure and a placeholder for our efforts.

The Process Management Principle The foundation of process management is in the understanding that achieving process results requires a systematic approach to addressing three dimensions of quality:

• Quality of Design (QD) in which customer, business, and technical requirements are identified and translated into activities to meet our organizational mission.

• Quality of Conformance and Compliance (QCC) in which we ensure that our design intentions are implemented as planned and that others understand and can follow our specifications.

• Quality of Performance (QP) in which we ensure that the process and procedure designs that we have put in place are having the expected beneficial result on the business bottom line. It is our attention to performance analysis that drives iterations of the QD and QCC dimensions.


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Figure 1. The Process Management Principle

This can all be summed up as, “Nothing happens on a reliable and sustained basis, unless we design and manage it to operate on a reliable and sustained basis.”

Our Primary Processes, Secondary Processes, and Our Skill Sets A process is a structure for organizing value-adding work to achieve business milestones in a way that is effective and efficient - that organizes daily work to achieve strategic and tactical goals.

Our primary processes are:

• Customer Service Process Stewardship – tool reviews, training reviews, design and implementation analysis and input, content update, and tool and process bug resolution.

• Procedure and Scenario Design and Implementation – ensuring there is a procedure/scenario standard established, that it is followed, that it is effective, and that insights from this analysis will guide future work.

• Contact Center Core Process Improvement – using the established principles of quality improvement and lean design to optimize global contact center operations.


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Our secondary processes include providing expertise on:

• Strategic and tactical planning • Target and goal-setting • Project management • Quantitative analysis • Benchmarking best practices • Developing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and performance dashboards.

Our key team skills include:

• Quality and lean disciplines • Knowledge of industry and Xbox global contact center operations and tools • Knowledge of new product, process, and tool technical and business cycle requirements • Efficient use of Microsoft business systems and data resources • Communication and persuasion • Sharepoint and web site design and implementation • Team building and priority management.

Primary Process #1: Customer Service Process Stewardship Much of our work is concentrated on leadership or participation on project teams providing process workstream expertise for new releases, product and tool updates, and bug resolution. As process management stewards, we provide process and practice detail and continually ensure that the “process triangle” of Procedures – Tools – and People is managed.


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Figure 2. The Process Triangle

Process management coordinates and collaborates directly with other organizations for the business process of Release Management. New releases may be especially complex and problematic with many individuals worldwide collaborating to provide seamless Xbox customer service.


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Figure 3. Interactions for Release Management

The Experience Management Framework (EMF) is the governance model that Xbox uses to help organize and prioritize all the formal projects that are either proposed or currently underway. The EMF is the end-to-end business process used to provide formal project management discipline for the entire Release Management system.

The goals of the EMF are to:

• Decrease spin and randomization across the organization • Clearly identify capacity constraints and stabilize workload balance • Increase awareness, communication, and collaboration across teams


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• Ensure we’re working on the right things for the right reasons • Ensure a consistent delivery, training, and documentation model for all projects • Approve and document all changes to a project plan.

The XPMs (Experience Program Managers) identify new product/service requirements, develop support scenarios, and create design bugs used throughout the Release Management process to assign responsibility, track progress, and ensure necessary actions are taken.

Forecasting provides insight into the expected workload of a new product/service or change.

Content Publishing provides documentation and authorizing references in the form of URLs and Visual Knowledge Base (VKB) articles.

The Business Intelligence and Analytics teams provide business and process performance reports and maintain a consistent taxonomy of key performance indicators.

The Tools teams define and develop the tools set needed to implement a new product/service or change. Among other contributions, the Solution Wizard team provides Process Management with node transversal reports to document the actual performance of Xbox Agents while they are serving customers.

The Learning and Development team documents training requirements, designs new training, and delivers training to the vendors who manage day to day operations at our contact centers all over the world.

The Service Delivery teams pilot new tools and processes, provide input to the Process Management effort documenting new procedures, deploy new tools and processes, and track conformance of tool, process, and procedure implementations.

The role of Process Management on these teams is to provide stewardship to existing processes, ensure changes are tracked and resolved as bugs, and to establish detailed business and technical process analyses to baseline Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) so teams can measure their direct contribution to Microsoft’s bottom line performance.


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For more information consult the following experts:

For EMF: Kimberly Miller-Olson

For Business Intelligence and Analytics: Loren Gustafson and Ilyse Wagner

For Solution Wizard: Kevin Carson

For Learning and Development: Paul Blount

For Process Management interactions: Charlene Francisco, Gaku Shimizu, Ram Ramkumar, Tim Ross.


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Primary Process #2: Procedure and Scenario Design and Implementation

A key function of Process Management is to define procedures and document them in KB articles and publish them on the Worldwide CS&P and Xbox Procedures Website. The procedure development cycle is designed to ensure that optimal and up-to-date standards are available to support all the teams, organizations, and contact centers worldwide.

The design of new procedures begins with defining an optimal procedure in the Process Engineering cycle in Figure 4.

Figure 4. The System for Developing Procedures and Standards

An optimal procedure covers the most common node traversal paths taken by agents and highlights problematic transactions. This is accomplished by collecting data of agent node traversals, analyzing the methods and outcomes actually experienced by agents, and comparing the complexity of procedures with agent performance metrics and customer satisfaction surveys complete with detailed verbatims of customer comments.

Because our agent tools often provide more than one way to accomplish a task, the one best method is refined using actual production tools and accounts. New procedures are often reviewed by Xbox


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Agent Supervisors and Learning and Development experts to ensure they are compatible, consumable, and available.

Conformance and compliance are checked by the Service Delivery Quality team and by contact center site visits by Process Management team members.

Evaluating the performance contribution of a new procedure is challenging since the overall Quality of Service (QoS) reporting lacks the needed granularity to identify causal effects on system performance. Limited and focused deployments provide much richer and more meaningful feedback on Project Engineering efforts.

Figure 5. The Procedure Management System

The current system establishes KB articles and Visio workflows of the most common customer service interactions and documents them on the Worldwide CS&P and Xbox Procedures Library


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SharePoint Site where they’re used as references by other customer service organizations and Xbox agents. The site offers a visual snapshot of a procedure on a single screen and provides links to primary and secondary Knowledge Base articles in an agile, adaptive framework suitable for all LOBs. The procedures library uses a VKB site permission level that is available to anyone on the corporate network of the extranet and is searchable by global region.

For more information on Process Engineering, consult Gaku Shimizu, Ram Ramkumar, Alexis Razon, Tim Ross, or Jeffrey Elliott. For more information on the CS&P and Xbox Worldwide Procedures Library, consult Andy Williams, Travis Smith, or Susan McDermott.

Primary Process #3: Contact Center Core Process Improvement

Providing a troubleshooting and account management resource for Xbox customers is both complex and expensive. Helping a customer resolve their problems over the phone can cost Microsoft up to $10.00 per issue and with tens of thousands of issues being resolved daily by almost 3000 agents worldwide, the costs accumulate rapidly. The Process Management team is dedicated to continual improvement and cost reduction of customer service using statistical insight, process analysis, and selective aspects of the Lean and Six Sigma disciplines.

Traditionally, a customer service call has been seen as a series of processes each taking anywhere from 4 seconds to 30 minutes or more. By breaking the call into core process components and procedures, and then analyzing the agent actions and times across major issues (call drivers), we can uncover opportunities to shave seconds and minutes off the time spent to resolve a customer’s issue.


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Figure 6. Flowchart of Core Processes with Average Times

Core Process Definitions:

“Greeting” begins when the agent answers the call and identifies himself. Greeting ends when the agent inquires about the reason for the call.

“Contact Reason” begins when the agent says, “What may I help you with today?” Contact Reason ends when the agent announces he’s ready to locate the customer account.

“Customer Verification” begins when the agent tells the customer it is necessary to verify identification information. Verification ends when the agent indicates that he has found the customer account.

“Solution Search and Delivery” begins after the agent tells the customer the account has been located and the necessary identification criteria have been satisfied. Solution Search and Delivery ends when the key issue is resolved and acknowledged by the customer.


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“Closing” begins when the solution is complete and ends when the customer has received any documenting reference numbers and indicates that no further questions remain.

Studies commissioned by Ron Burroughs and conducted early in 2012 established highly accurate times spent resolving key issues as a baseline of performance. These studies covered all core processes and the top 10 call drivers. The following examples were developed after listening to recordings of 100 actual customer service calls (full reports are available).

Figure 7. Example: Probability Plot of Core Process: Solution Search and Delivery

This probability plot shows that about half the time (the 50th percentile) the core process of Solution Search and Delivery will take about 16 minutes and 80% of the time will vary between 5 and 53 minutes. This is a very wide range of variation and is a prime target for process improvement.

In another view, the call driver “Unable to Connect” is charted by core process with symbols representing the times spent in each core process. This chart provides a graphic view of which core processes take the most time and have the most variation.


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Figure 8. Example: Graphic View of Minutes Spent on Core Processes

In this example, the chart shows clearly that the most time and the most variation appears in the core process of Solution Search and Delivery.

Two projects were initiated in 2012 to address the handling times and costs by tool/process redesign, lean simplification, and technology advances. These projects got their start in two-day offsite sessions lead by Microsoft Business Excellence Master Black Belt, Kandy Senthilmaran.

The first project in February 2012 was focused on ensuring that our tools and procedures supported Xbox agents to minimize the need for an agent to “opt-out” of a structured troubleshooting path. The revised “Happy Path” promises much better performance and ease of use for agents.


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Figure 9. New Core Agent Process

The second project in August, focused on reducing Average Handling Time (AHT) on customer support calls. This project was fortified with use of the Lean tools Value Stream Mapping (VSM) and Process Value/Non-Value analysis.

Some of the outcomes included eliminating the use of a customer’s gamertag as a means of identification (since they often make use of unusual syntax requiring a lengthy spelling-out conversation). Another outcome was to stop the traditional practice of reading the Service Request Number to the customer in the closing. This innovation alone is expected to save over $500,000 per year.

For more information on Contact Center Core Process Improvement projects consult Ron Burroughs, Jenn Baggs, Ram Ramkumar, or Gaku Shimizu.

Looking Forward: Opportunities for Improvement in Process Management

Generally, much opportunity for our organization lies in documenting the “how” of what we do so it is repeatable and can be quickly grasped by new team members.


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For example: a major opportunity for improving the Procedure Management System is to formalize the “check” relationships in the system. The red arrows in Figure 10 identify relationships that are either occasional or are currently completed by exception. This situation is common in organizations which rely upon the skills and productivity of a few very talented individuals. Even a modest approach toward standardizing systems like these is a major step forward in the development of reliable and sustained value-added work.

Figure 10. Opportunities for Standardizing Our Procedure Management System

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