26 March 2008
Johannesburg — MICROSOFT is aiming to become one of the most customer-friendly companies in the world by launching a new way of monitoring client satisfaction.
"If I may be bold, I am trying to rewrite the way the industry does customer feedback," says Mark Hill, the South African expat responsible for championing the entire satisfaction- monitoring system.
That is bold indeed, and remarkably warm and fuzzy for a company still saddled with a reputation for bullying its way to dominance, using methods that have drawn massive fines for anticompetitive behaviour.
Ah, but this is the new Microsoft, says Hill, the Seattle-based GM of sales excellence who has spent the past few years thoroughly shaking up the way its sales teams are assessed.
His new system, to be launched in August, will "set the standard for how large companies evaluate the value they provide customers," he says. Hill has already devised an infrastructure optimisation programme to assess how happy its 15000 largest corporate clients are with its products and services. As part of that, its sales force is measured by how much success their customers get from using its products and not by how much kit they sell.
Measuring the revenue that they generate is still important because a company must focus on the bottom line, Hill says, "but that doesn't necessarily drive the behaviour we want our customers to experience.
"It's about putting more science into selling."
Hill chats rapidly and zealously about the programme, even though, for him, our interview is taking place at 6.15am. That's hardly an early start for someone who deals with so many time zones. On a typical day he'll work from 4am to 7am before driving his sons to school and reaching work by 8am. He'll probably work again from 9pm to 11pm, saying "during the day I can take a little time off if I want to". Somehow you know he never does.
Hill continues to enthuse about his customer-centric satisfaction scheme. "Instead of measuring pure sales we measure how our account teams are helping customers achieve more in capabilities such as security, management and unified communications."
It isn't entirely altruistic, of course. The approach aims at increased customer satisfaction, and happy customers use more of a company's products and spend more money.
The new client-monitoring system will build on that, asking the top 15000 customers specific questions so they can be benchmarked against similar firms around the world.
It will look at which products each customer has bought and how they use them, and compare them with their peers for efficiency. Individual account teams around the world can then be held responsible for any disgruntled or under-performing customers.
One goal is to encourage customers to treat Microsoft as a partner, by telling it what their business challenges are and asking it to solve those problems. As Hill says, "There is no other organisation in the world that has every large company as its customer," so keeping them happy is crucial.
Hill joined Microsoft in 1992 as one of the first five employees in SA. "At that stage it was just starting to do a lot of global expansion. I joined before we had any infrastructure whatsoever and we hired about 20 people a week and built offices in Sandton."
His background in engineering and computer science saw him signed up as a product manager handling technical issues. After stints in marketing and recruiting partners to sell and support its products he spent six months in the US "to come up with clever ideas".
Then he ran the entire African region for five years before being summoned back to Seattle as a business manager. That was "a bit of a nebulous title" where he was assigned to vice-president Kevin Johnson as a cross between an assistant and a confidant . "It's a highly respected role. I'd be talking on behalf of Kevin and running meetings for him and making decisions on what topics we are going to cover, and also being the fixer in a crisis."
I suggest that makes Hill sound rather like the dapper George Clooney in his latest movie, Michael Clayton, where he plays a mover and shaker for a powerful organisation. Hill is baffled. He hasn't seen it. He probably never has the time.
Part of that caretaker role involved analysing potential acquisitions to calculate a ball-park bid before an offer was announced. "It was really a lot of fun," he says.
Fun isn't a word he uses often, and he creates a definite impression of a man who has become very serious about his work and his life. He has, and with good reason.
Soon we're discussing his sons aged 11 and eight and a daughter aged two. That's a large gap in the middle.
"Was your third child an accident?" I joke.
There's a tiny pause, a breathing in that even the long-distance static can't hide. Hill tells me that another daughter born before they moved to the US suffered from unexplained seizures, and died in 2004.
"She'd just go into seizures. We tried everything in the book to find out what was happening but nobody got to the bottom of it, and one morning she had passed away in the night."
Hill lives in a new suburb where almost everyone works for Microsoft and moved there from all over the world at the same time, creating an instant camaraderie. "Everyone in the community would help her and everyone watched this progress. I was shocked at how much the community reached out. Everybody put her name on a bench and now we do functions around the bench."
That really emphasises the difference between SA and "the cocooned environment" he now lives in. "Here there are no high walls around you so you get to know the neighbours. There's a real sense of community."
Yet he still describes himself as proudly South African and owns a home at Pecanwood, the swanky golf resort that he visits once or maybe twice a year.
Microsoft rewards its upper echelons of managers with sabbaticals, and Hill recently spent 10 weeks on holiday, mostly in SA. "I had fun with my children and did some travelling. I'm an avid game photographer so I spent a lot of time at parks. We went scuba diving in Mauritius and caught up with my friends."
He was happy to get back to work, though. "I'd drive my wife batty if I stayed at home because I'd make them all work and give them written reports. My wife sometimes says to me, "Mark, I don't work for you, I don't need a written review," and I say, "I'm just trying to make you more efficient."
Several South Africans have done very well within Microsoft, he says, as they have a hunger that drives innovation and creativity. "Managers find you to be extremely hard-working ... low-maintenance people because you just get on with the job."
Hill wants to give a message to other South Africans as the interview winds down. "It doesn't matter where you grow up. I never went to a fancy school and I managed to drag myself through university. You can still be extremely effective anywhere in the world."
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