30 minute interview

India GSC is Microsoft’s largest in the Asia Pacific region

Manish Sinha Managing Director-Asia Pacific, Customer Service & Support, Microsoft Global Support Centre

Having completed a year in India, Microsoft’s Global Support Centre is expected to provide support to the company’s large enterprise customers.

*In what way does the work undertaken by the Microsoft Global Support Centre in India differ from that of traditional call centres?

Microsoft’s Global Support Centres (GSCs) services in India can be divided into professional support and enterprise level support. Under professional services we provide technical support to our Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) and to large customers at the enterprise level. Since large enterprises already have a full-fledged IT team in place they try to solve any problem themselves and in case it is not solved by them it comes to our Indian GSCs. Each of our employees in the GSC handles an average of two calls per day.

On the other hand, a traditional call centre generates individual customer inquires which can range from anything to the industry in which the call centre operates. Call centres are generally process oriented and follow the same set of processes as designed by the company that is outsourcing its processes. On a daily basis a call centre agent handles an average of 100 calls and each call lasts for five to ten minutes.

*Please elaborate on the kind of technical problems handled by GSC?

The technical problems range from complex to very complex. If the entire site of a large retailer is down, it needs to be quickly made active. There are sometimes problems with the operating system not integrating with the database. Most problems are solved remotely, but in case they are not, then we have onsite support engineers who rectify the problems at the customer’s location. Currently more than 70 percent of problems that the India GSC handles, cater to professional level support involving SMBs. Now our people at GSC are trained to handle enterprise-level complex technical problems and we will see our Indian GSC providing enterprise-level support to some of our large customers in the next 12-18 months.

*How significant is the Indian GSC to Microsoft’s global strategy?

The Indian GSC is Microsoft’s largest in the Asia Pacific region. We have centres in China, Australia, Japan and Korea in the Asia Pacific region. Although the one in China is comparable in size to the one in India, the others are much smaller. The Indian centre is very strategic to Microsoft as it supports more than 170 Microsoft products. We are going to delegate more enterprise-level support work to the Indian centre in the coming months.

*What are your plans for the Indian GSC and do you face attrition problems?

We have ambitious plans for this centre. We would continue to acquire talented people who have some experience in an IT set-up of a large enterprise and also have a technical background such as a MCA degree or experience in system administration. We will continue to increase complexity levels of problems to be handled by the GSC here for which we will be very selective in choosing the right kind of people. Currently we have 400 people at our Indian centre, which will continue to grow.

As far as attrition is concerned it is the lowest in the industry and is less than 10 percent. We ensure that a proper career development path is earmarked for our employees. We ensure that an employee gets an opportunity to work in different divisions of Microsoft based on his or her ability. I myself have been in seven different job roles during my stay with Microsoft over the last ten years. Change of job role keeps an employee in the best of spirits and exposes them to new technology areas.

Abhinav Singh