Microsoft Corporation - Customer Service Success

Company: Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA
Company Description: Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation which produces computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Awards Success Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Success - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Microsoft breaks language barriers with AI

Microsoft Answers Community & Translation - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuQc9aDhCvY

Microsoft is a technology company with a mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. Part of that mission is to help customers get the most out of their Microsoft products by providing technical support and customer service. The Microsoft Answers Support Community is an integral part of this work.

Created in 2011, the Microsoft Answers Support Community is an online forum that supports over 1.5M customers a day across 24 languages and 20 product categories, including Windows, Microsoft 365, and Xbox. To ensure customers receive helpful and timely replies, Microsoft hires freelancers experts to reply to questions.

The small number of questions that customers ask in some language forums make it challenging to offer expert support across the product portfolio. For example, there are enough questions in English to have experts across 20 product categories. This is not the case in low volume language forums such as Greek or Hebrew. As a result, non-English customers waited longer than their English peers for responses and received less successful replies.

Sarting in 2020, the Community team partnered with Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services to explore how to effectively translate informal and sometimes grammatically incorrect questions. The team started with Spanish and French. They established a process and cadence to train the machine learning AI how to translate different technical support scenarios, which significantly increased the accuracy of the translations. After months of teaching, the teams slowly added new languages until they onboarded the more challenging languages for the AI, such as Korean and Turkish.

The result was a 10-percentage point increase in customer success and a 75x improvement in response time. By using translation services, Microsoft focused on getting the best possible expert to reply regardless of language.

In 2021, Microsoft built translation services into the Community platform so all experts, including support engineers and volunteers, could share their product knowledge without language limitations.

Translation is challenging to do well in conversational text. For example, if a person mistakenly posts “Cortana can’t here me,” the text translation in Spanish is “Cortana no puede estar aquí conmigo,” meaning “Cortana isn’t here with me.” It should be “Cortana no puede oírme.”

By being able to interpret and translate customer intent, Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services provides an effective and reliable way to translate conversations on demand.
Experts in the Answers Community can now come together to help one another without being siloed by language. Customers win because they get faster help from a product expert. Microsoft wins because it is supporting its mission

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuQc9aDhCvY Microsoft Answers Community & Translation - YouTube

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us Microsoft Community

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3gGzYo-nY Ask the Microsoft Community & get help | Microsoft - YouTube

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/translator/language-support Language support - Translator - Azure Cognitive Services | Microsoft Docs

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/speech-translation/#features Speech Translation | Microsoft Azure

https://news.microsoft.com/facts-about-microsoft/ Facts About Microsoft - Stories