The end of 'hold music' is nigh!
This week I experience problems with my XBOX, to cut a long story short I can't talk to people online and to be honest this is half the fun. Like most people, after doing a little investigation I phoned xbox live support and after 10 minutes or so of listening to Beethoven I was put through to someone in first tier support, no doubt they had a number of other people in the queue and on the phone to them at the same time!. Perhaps then, this is why we have recently acquired Colloquis, a software companies that make natural language bots for instant messaging platforms.
This is something I have discussed both on this blog as well as internally and its great to see that we have gone ahead and acquired a company with such talents. The plan for the service is to act as a line of support for XBOX but I hope we extend this out to a number of other areas such as
- Virtual Account Manager - Ask your virtual account manager for the latest update on the your support case, how many hours you have left on your premier contract
- Virtual Partner Account Manager - Our PAMs get asked a lot of questions which some of the time get passed onto the Partner Technology Specialist team, perhaps some of these could get resolved by the virtual PAM or virtual PTS
- support.microsoft.com - Wouldn't it be great if you could say to the virtual support engineer "When I open an email in Outlook I get an error 432". It could then reply back and tell you that you need to run scanpst or send you a link to a support article.
I think there is a lot of potential here, not only for support from Microsoft but also to branch out into different areas, perhaps even a virtual product manager ;-).
Feel free to post your comments on how else you would like to see Microsoft use this technology to make your interactions with us more productive!. I will see if I can get some of them to happen !