Microsoft Corporation Assignment-5 Questions

1. What factors suggest that Microsoft’s PSS Division needs a more comprehensive and flexible
approach for its service offerings?

 Excessive service customer service cost in the company’s statement hinted on a larger issue
that could be acute in three years

 Secondly the company’s internal market research survey showed that the customers were
puzzled at the bizarre service that sometimes asked them to pay for trivial services and
sometime asked people to pay for service they didn’t want

 The company internally knew that its service program framework was flawed as there was
differential pricing for customers with multiple Microsoft products plus the customers didn’t
receive up to the mark service

 Some products were offered unlimited ‘free service’ whereas some were offered no services
at all. Customers that owned multiple products were not sure about what service they would
receive for which of their products

 Their competition in multiple product segments were delivering better service through
different modes such as the IVRS and other and charged customer by the hour which the
corporate customers liked

 The myriad of services of Microsoft that had over 150 products that led to significant
confusion and hodgepodge of the services

 This all was envisioned by the legendary founder Bill gates who wanted to differentiate
himself through ultimate products with perfect services and therefore he supported this
overhaul of their entire product and service system

2. Based upon the guidelines that senior management has provided Trish May, what product
support strategy has Microsoft envisioned??

 The services were needed to be simple, easily understood, easily communicated and
perfectly executed

 Addressing the tactical need of charging what services

 These services would be internally supported for fixed charges and free of cost depending on
their nature, and this should be communicated to the consumer who would know for what
services will he be given services
  The internal team was attracted by the idea of using a matrix structure to summarize and
understand the various service offering for the respective product and what customers this
matrix structure was referred to as the Matrix support network 1.0

 Consequently, this team approved of such a structure enthusiastically with approval from all
the product managers who were earlier collaborated with for offering services and hence
their approval was ecstatic

 However, since there were multiple product and the requirement of services was to be
thought from the customers perspective, there rose a problem of the number of rows and
column for the matrix support network 1.0

3. How should the Microsoft Support Network 1.0 matrix bet structured in terms of rows and
columns?

There was significant disagreement over the matrix structure regarding the services and product
therefore to clarify these were followed:

 The columns consisted of the difference among the services in reference to the product
however the rows captured the major service groupings

 Each element that was formed with the intersecting of the row, i.e. major service grouping
and column i.e. the differences would elucidate a defined and specific service offering and
would therefore clarify the fee structure

 There were multiple approaches which were conflicted on the very nature of their basis such
as

 Alternative #1: Problem-Based Services x Product Categories

 Alternative #2: Problem-Based Services x Customer Segments

 Alternative #3: Responsiveness-Based Services x Product Categories

 Alternative #4: Responsiveness-Based Services x Customer Segments

4. Which services should Microsoft offer; a) offer as free or “standard”, b) sell as an option for an
additional fee, and c) not offered (but have a 3rd party service provider partner offer)?

Among all services Microsoft offers there are certain services that it should categorize as ‘free’
standard or sell it out on additional fee

 Free installation and start-up service on Developer products application and PC operating
system as this service is already being offered by competitors

 There was a lot of issue for some customers within the first 90 days of purchase, however
providing all of them service jammed the company’s toll free line and hence blocked the
more important customers such as corporate’s who were ready to pay additional money for
 getting exclusive service hence they should offer assistance for a fee for developers and
corporate client however the individual customer should be directed to FAQ or highly
specialised website that aid in this process

 Premium corporate customers and developers should be charged a fee that is premium in
nature since they are ready to pay for exclusive service

 Cross platform and integration problems within external vendor products they shouldn’t be
supported by Microsoft and therefore should be redirect to third party ISV and VAR

5. What implementation problems should PSS managers anticipate? How can PSS manages
successfully overcome them?

 It would have been impossible to clean out the idea that people would start paying for ‘free’
installation and services on developer products operating system and start-up programs

 Customer could develop an idea that it was a grand scheme of the software and hardware
companies to extort fees to pad their profits and they know that it was unethical for them to
such a thing additionally it could be created in the customers mind at software companies
were making this software intentionally difficult

 Mangers would make it difficult in time making and designing usage and productivity
assistance service engineers could tackle the application software problems at a relatively
lower cost however they would incur heavy loss in PC operating system and hardware
problems

 A lot of confusion of what services were to be offered and who should provide them? Since
most of the PC operating system software was pre-installed so there was a lot of issue that
the original manufactures such as DELL and IBM & COMPAQ should handle these issues, or
the local computer dealer should handle the basic service issue amongst the 90 days of
purchase

 Another problem was determining how to charge the customers for what type and how
many services and how like IVRS, toll free and how should they receive payments like ‘service
credits’, ‘credit card’, or ‘incident coupons’

 The solution would be to integrate systems and include a standard customize support to
cover the cost of price premium

 Function responsiveness would have been an accurate measure that would have made time
vs cost decision easier

 A cover cost for customers that required assistance within the 90 days would have created a
strong service offering as corporate and developers were looking for such an avenue and this
would have given the company to focus and the and divert the ordinary customers to other
service points