In the favour of volunteers, Microsoft laid off Xbox support staff

Earlier this month Microsoft laid off a team of Xbox support staff. According to the two sources affected by the layoffs, The Xbox fans were replacing them with the volunteer.

There were around 12 people who lost their jobs in the earlier this month. With the direct support, the team had worked and inquiries made via the popular Twitter account @XboxSupport. Affirma Consulting is the company by which they were employed but mainly worked in Microsoft’s offices.

Xbox Ambassadors, they also worked with volunteer members of the public, who are rewarded with prizes for helping deal with support inquiries. With the training of  Ambassadors, Some of those who lost their jobs had been tasked recently. According to one source, and prior to the layoffs, the paid support team had been tasked specifically with increasing input from Ambassadors.

Microsoft has retained a small team to manage the Ambassadors that understand the polygon. A spokesperson for Microsoft sent us the following statement when reached for comment. The statement was “We continue to have a number of highly-trained customer support agents, plus community ambassadors, available to help customers with their needs.”

For the specific information about the layoffs, the company did not respond to Polygon’s request. Polygon did not receive a reply even after Polygon contacted Affirma Consulting.

More than a million followers have a Microsoft’s Xbox Support Twitter account. The account directly responded to dozens of inquiries every day, amounting to more than 2.9 million tweets. In recent weeks, the account has mostly restricted itself to retweeting messages from the Xbox Ambassadors account. XboxSupport is now being handled by Ambassador sent to the Tweets.

Via an online chat tool, Xbox Ambassadors also deal with inquiries and are rewarded for their efforts via leaderboards, which then dispense XP as well as entries to prize competitions. with the “missions” and sweepstakes prizes, the program is set up like a game. yes, it is true that the system clearly has some hitches. we received a message stating that no Ambassadors were available to take our question. On Twitter, we were recommended to contact @XboxSupport or to consult the forums. most importantly, other attempts were dealt with more promptly.

Polygon was told by the one former support team member that Microsoft’s cost-cutting will likely have a negative impact on support service, arguing that Ambassadors lack the detailed knowledge of a fully funded team.

its first line of response says that Microsoft’s Xbox support website presents an AI chat assistant. online chat or Twitter were then suggested forms