At Microsoft, employees across various departments, including developers, HR professionals, marketers, and sellers, serve as the company’s “Customer Zero.” This means they are the first to use new products and services, providing essential feedback that helps refine these offerings before they reach external customers. Nathalie D’Hers, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Digital, highlights the importance of this role: “One of the best parts of leading Microsoft Digital is getting to be Customer Zero for our latest products.”
To facilitate this process, effective internal communication is crucial. Microsoft’s IT Communications team has been overhauling its strategies to ensure employees receive timely and relevant information. D’Hers emphasizes, “Your employees won’t get behind you if you don’t bring them in at the right time with the right info.” This approach fosters collaboration, empowers individuals, and drives business growth, establishing communication as a strategic advantage. It enables the company to align teams, engage customers, and deliver innovative solutions.
Microsoft Viva Amplify: A New Era for Internal Communications
Microsoft’s IT Communications team is preparing to leverage Microsoft Viva Amplify, a new communications platform set to roll out in September 2023. This platform aims to provide a more streamlined and efficient way to disseminate messages to employees. The core function of the IT Communications team is to keep employees informed of product updates and provide productivity guidance, while also gathering valuable feedback.
The team’s objective is to drive product adoption, boost employee engagement and productivity, and cultivate customer empathy within product development groups. “Getting communications right is critical,” D’Hers states. “It fosters collaboration, empowers individuals, and drives business growth. At Microsoft, we recognize that getting communications right is not just a necessary skill, but a strategic advantage. It enables us to align our teams, engage our customers, and ultimately, deliver innovative solutions that transform people’s lives.”
Effective communication is key. It helps them understand the “why” behind changes and adapt more readily.
To achieve effective communication, the IT Communications team follows three guiding communication pillars: inform, inspire, and innovate.
Inform
The “Inform” pillar focuses on educating employees about new product features, discussing the significance of changes, and encouraging experimentation with new products. According to Diana McCarty, a principal group content program manager and the leader of Microsoft’s IT Communications team, “Our goal is to ensure people at Microsoft know about, embrace, and influence technology changes at Microsoft. To do that, we provide critical information about technologies developed within Microsoft to employees.” Preventing employee burnout is also crucial, which is accomplished using user-centric messaging. This approach utilizes multiple channels to deliver clear and concise information to employees where they are most active.
Inspire
The “Inspire” pillar emphasizes the importance of creating content that resonates with employees. “We feel that Microsoft employees are consumers—they are our Customer Zero,” says Susanne Smith, a principal content PM manager on the IT Communications team in Microsoft Digital. “And, like external consumers, they want content that is inspiring.” The team aims to create moments that make employees feel valued and connected.
Innovate
Innovation involves incorporating employee feedback and facilitating two-way communication between internal customers and product teams. “We work with product and deployment teams to roll out new technologies. As we receive feedback from our internal customers, we send this back to the product teams—and often, features are added or altered using the feedback to create better end-user experiences,” McCarty explains.
Driving product adoption and engagement relies on making new products interesting to employees. Eva Etchells, a program manager on the IT Communications team, states, “We advocate for the employee experience to ensure that products properly serve the intended audience. We also drive product adoption by making new technologies interesting and relevant to employees.”
Executive Support Matters
Executive support plays a significant role in driving product adoption. Sarah Lundy, a senior program manager on the IT Communications team, notes, “It helps us drive adoption for new products when executives engage with the content we create. Leader sponsorship can make a huge difference.” The team successfully used the hashtag “#2022Reflections” to encourage reflections and interactions within Microsoft Viva Engage, spearheaded by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Microsoft Viva Amplify: The Communicator’s Toolkit
In a significant step, the IT Communications team became the first users — their own “Customer Zero” — of Microsoft Viva Amplify, providing valuable insights during its development.
Microsoft Viva Amplify, a component of the larger Microsoft Viva employee experience platform, empowers internal communication teams and leaders to optimize their messaging. It provides a single workspace to plan, create, and distribute communications across multiple platforms like email, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint.
Judith Yaaqoubi, a principal product manager on the Microsoft Viva Amplify product group, highlights the value of this collaboration: “To create Microsoft Viva Amplify, we did a lot of deep research with external companies, but also with the IT Communications team. They helped us understand the challenges they face as communicators, from designing communications campaigns to tracking employee engagement metrics. This informed our development of Viva Amplify and helped us build a better user experience very early on in development.”
Key Features of Microsoft Viva Amplify
- Campaign Orchestration: Tools for creating campaign briefs that ensure alignment on objectives and key messages among team members.
- Multi-Platform Publishing: The ability to create content once and automatically publish it across various Microsoft 365 tools, including Outlook, SharePoint, and Teams.
- Publication Preview: Allows users to see how content will appear on each platform before publishing.
- Performance Metrics: Provides detailed insights into campaign reach and engagement.
- Campaign Cards: Visualizes and manages all ongoing campaigns with real-time statuses.
McCarty emphasizes the platform’s efficiency: “Each platform has its own nuances, and we wanted to be able to get that right. Sending everything out at once with the ability to adjust the message for each endpoint is very powerful.”
The Future of Internal Communications
Looking ahead, the Microsoft Viva Amplify team aims to further empower communicators by incorporating AI-driven features. Naomi Moneypenny, who leads product development for Viva Amplify, states, “Internal communications is primed for a revolution. Our goal is to empower and scale the impact of communicators by managing their extended teams and assets effectively, recommending most effective actions and resources.”
The IT Communications team will continue to partner with other development teams to refine future communication tools. “From the channels that we use to the messaging we create all the way down to our use of AI to enhance our materials,” Smith says, “Everything we do ends up supporting our employees and customers, and that’s what truly drives us.”
Microsoft Viva Amplify is scheduled for public release in September 2023. It will undergo continuous improvements, guided by feedback from the IT Communications team and other early users.
