Service Response Lead

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. The GetHelp Support Escalation Manager is responsible for handling customer/partner escalations that come to the team through various internal channels. Escalations will require direct customer interaction with the goal of identifying and resolving issues related to Microsoft technology and services, ensuring they are resolved within established guidelines/policies. These escalations are some of our most challenging and difficult customer issues and will at times require dealing with highly sensitive customers and situations. Support Escalation Managers are highly motivated people with empathy, passion, integrity, and a knack for investigation & problem solving. Support Escalation Managers represent Microsoft by providing world class service and displaying our core principles in all their work. 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 Customer and Service Response Leadership Act as the primary point of contact for complex, prolonged, sensitive, or business-critical customer situations. Take end-to-end ownership of escalated service issues, ensuring that the appropriate response and escalation processes are followed. Understand the customer’s business impact, priorities, and expected outcomes through active listening and effective questioning. Develop and drive a clear response plan, including immediate mitigation, recovery actions, communication milestones, and longer-term resolution options. Maintain momentum until service is restored, business impact is reduced, and clear ownership is established for remaining actions. Deliver timely, accurate, and consistent updates to customers, partners, internal stakeholders, and leadership. Represent the customer’s perspective while balancing technical feasibility, operational requirements, organisational policies, and business priorities. Incident and Crisis Management Lead the response to high-impact incidents, critical situations, and complex service escalations. Establish the appropriate incident governance, stakeholder cadence, decision-making structure, and communication approach. Bring together support, engineering, operations, account, service management, and business teams to drive coordinated action. Identify blockers, clarify ownership, and escalate risks or decisions to the appropriate management level. Act as a crisis leader during catastrophic outages or other high-impact customer situations. Apply sound judgement and prioritisation in fast-moving, ambiguous environments. Ensure that response activities remain focused on customer impact, service restoration, and sustainable resolution. Stakeholder Management and Communication Build trusted relationships with customers, partners, support teams, engineering groups, operations teams, account organisations, and senior leaders. Coordinate communication between customers, internal requestors, technical teams, and management. Translate complex technical and operational information into clear, concise, and audience-appropriate updates. Manage customer and stakeholder expectations regarding progress, risks, response actions, and resolution. Communicate confidently and constructively across multiple organisational and management levels. Influence teams without direct authority and create alignment around shared customer and service outcomes. Demonstrate empathy, professionalism, integrity, and composure throughout challenging situations. Problem Prevention and Continuous Improvement Identify recurring issues, systemic risks, process gaps, and operational breakdowns revealed through service response activities. Ensure that unresolved risks and recurring problems are transitioned to the appropriate problem-management or service-management owners. Recommend preventative actions and longer-term improvements based on insights gathered from escalations and incidents. Lead or contribute to projects, working groups, and cross-functional initiatives that improve response processes, tools, governance, and customer experience. Provide reporting and actionable insights that support data-informed business decisions. Promote consistent use of established processes while identifying situations where processes create unnecessary barriers to customer resolution. Leadership and Organisational Capability Provide guidance and mentoring to service response and escalation team members managing complex situations. Share practical knowledge, response practices, case insights, and lessons learned across teams. Model strong accountability, customer advocacy, collaboration, and action-oriented leadership. Support organisational readiness for high-impact incidents and critical customer situations. Contribute to the development of scalable response capabilities across incident management, problem resolution, and service management. Qualifications 7+ years of relevant experience in customer support, service delivery, technical support, escalation management, incident management, critical-situation management, or a related technology-services role. Demonstrated experience managing complex, sensitive, or high-impact customer situations. Experience coordinating cross-functional technical and business teams to achieve customer and service outcomes. Strong written and verbal business English communication skills. Excellent judgement and decision-making skills, with the ability to operate under pressure and changing deadlines. Ability to assess business impact, identify immediate mitigation, and develop options for longer-term resolution. Ability to navigate ambiguity, remove blockers, and maintain progress across multiple workstreams. Strong stakeholder-management and influencing skills in an international or matrixed working environment. Strong prioritisation, organisation, time-management, and multitasking capabilities. Broad understanding of enterprise technology, cloud services, support operations, or service-management practices. Ability to work flexibly outside standard business hours when required by critical customer or service needs. Preferred Qualifications Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business, or a related discipline. Technical understanding of cloud platforms, infrastructure, networking, productivity solutions, business applications, or enterprise support environments. Experience in critical-incident, crisis, or major-incident management. ITIL or equivalent service-management certification. Project-management certification or demonstrated project leadership experience. Relevant cloud, technology, or Microsoft product certifications. Experience leading process-improvement, operational-governance, or problem-prevention initiatives. Additional language capabilities relevant to the customers or region supported. Core Competencies Customer advocacy: Represents the customer’s needs and business impact while driving practical outcomes. Service response leadership: Creates structure, ownership, urgency, and alignment during complex situations. Communication: Delivers clear, accurate, and audience-appropriate verbal and written communication. Active listening: Uses probing questions to understand customer needs and translate them into actions. Decision-making: Assesses alternatives and determines the next steps required to remove blockers. Collaboration and influence: Engages diverse teams and influences action without relying on direct authority. Empathy: Understands different perspectives and responds professionally to sensitive circumstances. Problem solving: Investigates issues, identifies dependencies, and drives short-term and long-term solutions. Prioritisation: Manages competing demands effectively in a fast-paced environment. Continuous improvement: Converts incident and escalation insights into sustainable service improvements. Working Conditions This role may support time-sensitive and business-critical customer situations outside standard working hours. Depending on operational requirements, the position may include an on-call rotation, shift-based coverage, weekends, or public holidays. Any specific shift pattern, security-screening requirement, or regional language requirement should be defined in the local job posting. Please be advised that only candidates who hold Australian Citizenship can be considered for this role , as Australian Citizenship is a mandatory eligibility requirement. 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. This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.