Microsoft: Order Management Services

Microsoft teams with Accenture to achieve high performance.

Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) used Accenture's custom outsourcing for many of its key operating activities to support its growing business. Costs are down and service delivery is up, prompting excellent customer-satisfaction scores and positioning Microsoft to achieve high performance.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft’s (EMEA) Operations Center in Dublin manages the end-to-end operational activities for its customers and channel partners across the region. The EMEA Operations Center processes more than 5.5 million orders each year and ships more than 26 million units to 120 countries across the region.

Accenture High Performance Business research found that integrated, standardized, end-to-end solutions are key to achieving high performance. Since March 2006, through our Industry-specific BPO Services’ order management business process outsourcing offering, Accenture has provided such a managed service to Microsoft.

Accenture is delivering key operational activities for Microsoft’s Volume Licensing and Commercial Services businesses—Microsoft’s biggest revenue earner in the multibillion dollar EMEA region—including:

• Contract, agreement and order processing for volume licensing.

• Order management and billing for commercial services.

• Rebate and channel incentive payment processing.

• Customer care for all operational and tools-related queries.

These services are provided in six languages in support of all relevant sales locations and time zones by a team of approximately 180 Accenture staff from Microsoft’s EMEA Operations Center in Dublin.

Accenture also helped implement a forecasting and capacity planning process, enabling Microsoft to ramp up staff to support peaks in business volumes and related customer queries.

Microsoft now has an alliance with a single provider that is accountable for service delivery and that drives an ongoing improvement plan for further success.

Overall productivity has increased while the cost per activity has decreased. Notably, this has been achieved within a context of business growth—as evidenced by Microsoft’s FY08 year-end figures—the largest ever in revenue and volume for the EMEA region. The Accenture team helped drive improvements in customer satisfaction in critical areas, resulting in improved overall customer-satisfaction scores.

In addition, Microsoft’s annual Channel Partner Satisfaction survey was recently completed for 2008 and the scores were the highest so far. Factors that contributed to these improved scores included:

• Providing a four-hour turnaround on phone prioritizations and efficiently handling escalations.

• Meeting transactional service level agreements and improving accuracy.

• Calling users to clarify issues logged and to provide updates.

• Implementing more frequent rebate statements and improving the quality of query responses.

Overall these scores place Microsoft in the upper quartile from a performance benchmarking perspective against its competitors. Teaming with Accenture has positioned Microsoft further along the road to high performance.