Support Escalation Management

Overview

MCAPS-Core accelerates customer outcomes and business growth. By uniting product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners around a common customer mission, we help customers realize value faster and turn innovation into measurable business impact. Through deep technical expertise and differentiated go-to-market execution, we win competitively, capture market share, and scale repeatable growth motions. We differentiate through value creation - delivering world-class, AI-powered customer experiences that accelerate adoption, strengthen loyalty, and create sustainable competitive advantage, driving growth that outpaces the market.

Within MCAPS - Core, the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization builds trust and confidence for every person and organization through delivering a seamless support experience. In CSS, we are powered by Microsoft’s AI technology to help consumers, businesses, partners, and more, resolve their issues quickly and securely, helping prevent future problems from occurring and achieving more from their Microsoft investment.

In the Customer Service & Support (CSS) organization we are looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success. As a Senior Support Escalation Manager, you will be the primary contact managing escalated customer and partner issues. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your problem-solving, collaboration and orchestration skills, and deepening your relationship management expertise.

The Senior Support Escalation Manager (Service Manager) is positioned and aligned with our customers as Chief Operating Officers within the account, strategically placed to ensure that we have the appropriate level of engagement to support and drive the customer’s reactive support landscape and improve operational health. You'll work with some of the world’s largest companies, public sector depts and not for profit organizations pursuing strategic activities, utilizing Microsoft technologies to modernize their business.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

Account Escalation Partner

Leads the reactive support strategy for a portfolio of strategic or mission critical accounts, often funded directly by customers. Serves as the senior escalation and crisis authority for those accounts, driving alignment and decision-making across internal and external stakeholders (Customer Success Account Managers [CSAMs], engineering, incident managers, legal/PR, executives) to resolve high impact issues while shaping business-critical tradeoffs based on the customer’s business impact. Assesses, analyzes, and prioritizes account and portfolio risk trends, designs and continuously improves incident response plans (e.g., Major Incident Response Plans [MIRPs]), and drives adoption of “Get to Green” programs across accounts to prevent recurrence and materially improve overall account and portfolio health. Develops and maintains executive-level relationships with customers’ business and technical leaders, influencing their architecture and operations strategy and shifting engagement models from reactive support to proactive, strategic partnership at scale.

Collaboration

Leverages relationships across teams to remove roadblocks. Establishes and oversees the development of written protocols to ensure customer issues are resolved. Identifies reoccurring roadblocks across the team and escalates as needed. Proactively cultivates, expands, and strategically leverages technical contacts, SME’s, and leaders to rapidly identify and mobilize the proper resources for issues that cross-Strategic Business Unit (SBU) responsibility.

Owns escalated issues and manages account-aligned customer incidents to identify and remove barriers. Ensures existing processes are not a blocker to customer issue resolution and influences the direction of process improvement efforts with a global perspective. Acts as an expert and provides informal guidance to Support Escalation team members on how to handle moderate to highly complex cases. Drives end?to?end resolution of highly complex, high?impact incidents with broad visibility (e.g., multi?customer or multi?workload issues), proactively managing ambiguity, stakeholder risk, and long?term customer impact. Serves as the primary escalation leader for the most critical incidents, assessing and prioritizing trade?offs, influencing engineering and product teams on remediation and prevention, and ensuring durable fixes and follow?through beyond incident closure. Proactively partners with leadership to design and refine incident rhythms, communication standards, and escalation pathways that improve consistency and quality across accounts and regions. Develops and formalizes best practices for structured incident leadership, coaching and upskilling others through post?incident reviews, training, and mentorship, and influencing incident management practices at scale beyond their immediate team.

Communication

Identifies and builds strategic relationships with internal teams, partners, and communications with senior leadership to resolve issues that are complex in scope. Develops and drives long-term, cross?Strategic Business Unit (SBU) partnership strategies, leverages relationships to remove systemic blockers, and aligns consistent, uniform engagement models from account teams to SBU(s) for broader business impact.

Manages customer and field expectations around issue response and represents the company independently, prioritizing security as a key component of customer satisfaction. Ensures customer and MSFT internal stakeholders stay informed on the response and resolution status of customer issues. Communicates and influences internally to drive faster issue resolution. incorporating effective security practices to mitigate risks. Proactively delivers definitive updates to teams involved (e.g., account, Customer Success Account Manager [CSAM], Technology Managers, Leadership, and Executive Leadership) and tailors communications to influence decisions and drive timely resolution.

Critical Event Response Manager

Proactively leads the management escalations as discrete transactions, focusing on, complex, and high?impact scenarios and driving both rapid stabilization and systemic prevention of recurrence, with engagement spanning varying levels of technical depth. Partners with senior customer or support stakeholders to ensure customers are informed, expectations are set, and escalation pressure is effectively managed throughout the incident lifecycle. Leads bridge operations and orchestrates crisis communications for escalated incidents or critical situations, ensuring consistent, accurate, and timely updates across customers, executives, and engineering, while maintaining compliance with legal, privacy, and communications standards. Drives and coordinates complex technical and operational response efforts, evaluates and refines processes, and mentors others in de?escalating distressed customers, often operating across queues spanning multiple customers, regions, or incident classes. Owns and analyzes post?incident insights to identify patterns and root causes, drives corrective and preventive actions across teams, and shares learnings to improve organizational resilience and incident management practices.

Customer Resolution

Acts as an internal expert to resolve longer running, sensitive, or escalated issues or acts as a primary contact for escalated issues on behalf of less experienced IC levels. Identifies and builds relationships with various internal and external teams and senior leaders to resolve customer issues. Leads strategic projects. Informally provides coaching, mentorship, or support to less experienced Support Escalation Managers to resolve customer issues. Manages complex or high-impact incidents, which are customer-impacting issues that require coordination, communication, and stakeholder/resource management to drive timely resolution. Drives the end-to-end escalation lifecycle for complex or high-impact scenarios, where escalations are incidents that require elevated visibility or intervention that involve direct engagement with customers or senior stakeholders, including intake, triage, prioritization, resolution, and follow-up, Serves as an expert representative of Microsoft, Leadership, or Strategic Business Unit (SBU) Leaders on internal/external calls. Exercises independent judgment to prioritize escalations based on customer impact, business risk, and urgency. Ensures accountability for escalation outcomes across involved teams, driving resolution strategy.

Leads initiatives by creating plans and managing relationships with other business units to improve the customer support experience for a group of customers or a specific region/area. Acts as a subject matter expert on best practices to support the customer experience, including proactively addressing security needs according to Microsoft’s security standards. Assesses and interprets outputs from AI-driven sentiment analysis tools to generate deeper, data?driven insights into customer pain points and drives proactive strategies to enhance customer service across products or segments. Proactively analyzes and models escalation risk signals using sentiment analysis, historical escalation data, and customer feedback, and develops recommendations to reduce escalation volume and impact. Analyzes, synthesizes, and presents customer feedback, escalation themes, and sentiment data to influence leadership decisions and shape long?term, cross?functional experience strategies, and shares learnings broadly to inform continuous improvement efforts.

Proactively coordinates resources and establishes relationships to drive opportunities within the team and across stakeholder groups in post-incident review discussions to remediate future issues. Assesses and analyzes risks surfaced during escalations and proactively ensures they are routed and elevated to the appropriate governance channels within or outside of their Strategic Business Unit (SBU) for timely resolution and broader visibility. Drives remediation efforts by interpreting findings from root cause analysis and develops and implements corrective follow-ups required, sharing insights and learnings across relevant stakeholders to prevent recurrence and improve overall risk management practices.

Leads strategic projects designed to improve resolution times, customer satisfaction, and support experience. Proactively designs and leads the implementation of AI?driven solutions to monitor, evaluate, and automate complex and cross?functional workflows, using data to analyze impact and drive gains in efficiency and satisfaction. Assesses and interprets data on systemic breakdowns across escalation workflows, handoffs, and decision points, analyzes root causes, and drives organization?wide changes that increase speed, accountability, and consistency. Drives and governs the automation and standardization of escalation workflows, developing frameworks and best practices that enable scalable and consistent adoption across Strategic Business Units (SBU)s. Develops and socializes escalation process for intake, tracking, and reporting, ensuring a robust model that supports diverse business needs.

Reviews status updates to customers and provides informal guidance to others on communicating with internal stakeholders through various channels of communication for highly sensitive or difficult issues. Proactively leverages and optimizes AI-driven communication tools to enhance and scale interactions with stakeholders. Leads the coordination and communication of the escalation narrative, driving alignment across senior stakeholders and orchestrating Confidence Calls to retain customers, solidify renewals, and capture strategic product or support feedback that informs broader improvements. Drives and refines a consistent, executive-ready escalation narrative, assessing impact and risks across complex accounts and guiding stakeholders on problem statement, impact, risks, and next actions for high-visibility situations.

Process Improvement

Reviews post-incident review executive summaries and identifies patterns across customer issues. Creates strategies to resolve reoccurring or highly sensitive issues in partnership with leadership. Leads forums and communities of practice to share best practices, evaluates their effectiveness, and drives adoption of standards to improve delivery quality and overall team performance across the organization.

Surfaces feedback from the team and drives collaboration across functions to identify systematic issues and leads process breakdowns to ensure resolution/progress. Creates strategy for process improvements and leads project or workgroup to improve internal processes. Assesses, interprets, and communicates new or potential process changes that could impact escalation delivery, analyzes risks and benefits, and drives implementation of improvements across teams.

Regional or Area Support Leader

Drives the strategy for critical customer recovery and escalation management efforts across regions, verticals, subsidiaries, or segments. Assesses and interprets aggregated patterns from escalations, delivery results, and post incident reviews to analyze systemic issues, operational health risks, and process breakdowns. Develops and prioritizes remediation strategies with broad impact. Leads and aligns cross?organizational Get to Green and improvement plans with Customer Service and Support (CSS), field, Customer Success Unit (CSU), and other senior business stakeholders to address complex, multi?faceted issues. Develops, evaluates, and refines Crisis Prevention and Management programs to ensure scalable, consistent execution across the field. Owns and evolves the strategy, development, and orchestration of Customer Trust Recovery activities for high?impact and complex customer scenarios. Serves as a trusted expert “voice of the customer” for reactive support, influencing senior leaders, shaping forums and governance mechanisms, and ensuring CSS priorities are integrated into business strategies and objectives, including revenue, consumption, and renewal outcomes. Drives cross?team, cross?region, and cross?functional initiatives, establishes and continuously improves protocols and networks to accelerate resolution, and champions sustainable, organization?wide changes in support quality and customer trust at scale.

Technical Recovery and Stabilization Leader

Leads technical recovery for complex and high-impact customer situations, shaping and driving “get-to-green” recovery plans across multiple issues and teams. Drives the diagnosis of root causes, orchestration of cross-functional technical resources, and restoration of service stability and customer confidence. Operates beyond the scope of individual incidents, supporting multi-issue recovery scenarios that span extended timeframes and require sustained technical coordination and leadership. Owns time-bound engagements but may persist until stability and agreed outcomes are achieved. Works closely with designated customers’ executive and senior technical leaders to align on recovery approach, anticipate and mitigate future escalations, and influence architecture and operational decisions that improve long-term stability. Utilizes deep technical expertise, structured recovery planning, and the ability to align support, engineering, and account teams around clear actions and priorities, influencing delivery of recovery outcomes and shifting conversations from reactive issue resolution to more proactive, strategic engagement. Identifies patterns and underlying drivers observed during recovery engagements and provides recommendations to address systemic issues, contributing to broader improvement efforts while remaining focused on technical recovery execution.

Vendor Relationships

Engages with outsourced Customer Service and Support [CSS] delivery partner specialists as part of standard support incident management and escalation resolution activities, not including the management, supervision, or direction of delivery partner resources beyond activities directly related to incident and escalation management coordination. Focuses partner engagements on coordinating efforts across teams, aligning stakeholders, and driving timely resolution of customer issues through effective collaboration, communication, and escalation management.

Other:

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 4+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or related field AND 6+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
  • OR 9+ years technology industry, customer service, or related experience
  • OR equivalent experience

Other Requirements:

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire / transfer and every two years thereafter.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working with Microsoft products and services.
• Cloud Technology Certification (Azure Fundamentals. M365 Fundamentals)
• Prior Incident and escalation management experience
• Proficient in C-level stakeholder management
• Candidate must be able to work PST

Support Escalation Management IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across Canada is CAD $128,000 - CAD $222,400 per year.

Find additional pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/canada-pay-information.html

Support Escalation Management IC5 - L'échelle salariale de base typique pour ce rôle dans l'ensemble du Canada est de 128,000 $ CAD à 222,400 $ CAD par année.

Pour plus d'information au sujet de la rémunération, veuillez cliquer ici:
https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/canada-pay-information.html

Ce poste sera ouvert pendant au moins cinq jours et les candidatures seront acceptées de façon continue jusqu’à ce que le poste soit pourvu.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft est un employeur offrant l’égalité d’accès à l’emploi. Tous les candidats qualifiés seront pris en considération pour l’emploi, sans égard à l’âge, à l’ascendance, à la citoyenneté, à la couleur, aux congés médicaux ou familiaux, à l’identité ou à l’expression de genre, aux renseignements génétiques, à l’état d’immigration, à l’état matrimonial, à l’état de santé, à l’origine nationale, à un éventuel handicap physique ou mental, à l’affiliation politique, au statut de vétéran protégé ou au statut militaire, à la race, à l’ethnie, à la religion, au sexe (y compris la grossesse), à l’orientation sexuelle ou à toute autre caractéristique protégée par les lois, ordonnances et règlements locaux applicables. Si vous avez besoin d’aide avec des accommodements religieux et/ou d’un accommodement raisonnable en raison d’un handicap pendant le processus de candidature, apprenez-en plus sur la demande d’accommodement.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.