Microsoft Enterprise Support: Design How Business Customers Get Issues Resolved

You are a product manager at Microsoft. Design a customer support product for Microsoft's business (B2B) customers. ```hint Who is on the other end In B2B support, the person with the problem, the person who contacts support and the person who pays for the support contract are often three different people. Work out which of them you are designing for before choosing channels. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is this the support experience Microsoft provides to the businesses that buy its products, or a product Microsoft would sell to other businesses for supporting their own customers? - Which products and customers are in scope: Microsoft 365 for small businesses, Azure for development teams, or large enterprises on premium support contracts? - Who contacts support: IT admins, developers, or end users inside the customer's company? - Are partners and resellers, who often handle first-line support for their customers, part of the design? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - How B2B support differs from consumer support: admins acting for many users, severity and contracts, and the business impact of downtime. - A chosen customer segment and the support journey from noticing an issue to resolving it, with the main pain points. - Self-service, assisted channels and escalation, prioritized into a clear first version. - Metrics such as time to resolution and customer effort, with guardrails on cost, quality and satisfaction. - Risks: access to customer data during troubleshooting, wrong AI answers, large outages and partner channel conflict. ### Follow-up Questions - An outage hits thousands of customers at once. How should the product behave so the support queue does not collapse? - Leadership wants an AI assistant to cut support cost. How do you decide what it may resolve on its own? - How would the design change if the prompt meant a support product Microsoft sells to other businesses?