How Microsoft employees came together in India to save lives during the epidemic – News Center Latin America

Sudhir Rao, Partner CDO, leads a team of architects and technical strategists working with partners and clients to develop new services and solutions. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, they created a portal that acts as an end-to-end classification solution, similar to what an air traffic controller does for aircraft to land and land. How it works.

An employee mails a request that is reflected in the classification portal. The tripartite leader looks at it, selects some standard answers according to the request, and assigns two friends using the simple drop-down option. Only employees who volunteered as friends will appear in the drop-down menu and those with fewer cases will appear at the top, courtesy of the listing system created by Honda.

Future customers of the pillar can also view the email thread that provides the history of the case. The portal offers a separate dashboard for the friend, showing the details of the case assigned to him. How many cases are there in different regions, how many of these cases are important, what people are asking for and for whom, among other details, so precisely they can get a glimpse.

The solution also sends automated emails. So if you search the Govt-19 testing centers in Mumbai, you will get an email in a standard format containing all the required information. This automatic email goes not only to the person requesting it, but also to the friends assigned to it.

Phone callers see the latest requests and the most up-to-date list of sources they need to check. This significantly improved the success rate for callers and friends, who had to make fewer calls to streamline resources.

The solution started running a chatbot, where employees could request the resources they needed and receive the latest verified tracks without submitting a request. This time, however, the second wave began to worsen. The “success rate” (how often information about resource resources is related) began to decline as resources dwindled rapidly. This means that volunteers often spend too much time calling customers who are without resources. It’s not enough to have people on the ground now, but they had to find ways to make sure there were recent tracks.

Chintamani Padmanabhan, Director and Associate Technical Adviser at Microsoft Customer Service and Support, said, “During the first two weeks, when the number of requests was high, they were overwhelming and emotional.

He leads a group of advisers spread across 18 countries and witnessed the deadly waves of the epidemic that hit China, Europe and the United States last year. “A lot of people are asking for help. We don’t have everything. There was a constant feeling of helplessness.”

With this in mind, a team from Microsoft’s India Development Center began developing a solution that would automate the process of finding evidence to ensure that phone callers spend more time calling their best customers.

“Before we came on the scene, people were sharing information from their personal resources or anywhere on the web or social media,” says Sudhir Ankara, senior engineering team engineering manager leading data and knowledge engineering. Organization

Ankara’s team had to overcome many challenges.

First, the data they received was unstructured and had different formats: text, images, PDF files, spreadsheets and links to websites.

Second, there is no way to find out how old the data is or if it has been previously shared by someone else.

“Time is very complicated. We ‘ve all heard of instances where someone shared a URL with contact details of a hospital with 10 free beds. But by the time someone approached the hospital, those beds were gone. Every minute saved is equal to saving someone’s life during this wave, ”he says proudly.

Ankara’s team developed their solution within two weeks. It collected data from social media, sent email aliases requests to employees, internal team groups created for this initiative and other sources where employees added data manually. Through Azure Computer Vision and Azure Natural Language Processing (NLP), the solution will remove duplicate entries, organize them according to age, and prepare them for callers.

# In which together

Many examples of the impact of this joint venture are recorded on Microsoft India’s own internal “wall of praise”.

It contains dozens of details about how volunteers made a difference: how an oxygen concentrator was given to someone’s husband in a remote location, how a much-needed injection was planned for a fellow sister, and how a hospital bed was integrated.

When seven members of his family, including a child, test positive, one describes how they experienced the test with the help of a designated friend. Another thank you to the team that coordinated the ambulance at midnight. Another friend who helped the children when both parents were admitted to the hospital thanked his friend.

“When the second wave came, we asked ourselves what we could do as colleagues and how we could go beyond what a company expects. What you see today is the result,” said Ravi Verma, service training head of Microsoft India Global Delivery, who led his company’s efforts from Hyderabad. Tadla says.

“Rather than helping people with a hospital bed or a phone number, we had to offer advice to those who were in disaster and called us as a last resort. We had to show them that we understand and that we are together,” said Anish Sandy, director of solutions solutions, who formed and led the local support team in Bangalore. .