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 !