All news articles
Lorikeet News Desk
Jul 21, 2025
TL;DR
Xbox's support transformation is underway, where AI is being used to make customer support a real time experience embedded into games.
Ivo Koster, Director of Product Quality and Services, aims to integrate support into the product experience, making it invisible and seamless for users.
AI handles 80% of transactional tasks, freeing human advocates to add value and improve customer interactions.
Koster's strategy includes early stakeholder involvement and breaking down silos to ensure secure, cohesive product development.
What we're driving for is that support becomes an integral part of the product. You don't go from playing, put your controller down, and then pick your phone up to get help. It's all incorporated so you never have to leave the experience.
Ivo Koster
Director of Product Quality & Services | Microsoft Xbox
For decades, customer support has been a destination—a separate, often frustrating, department customers are sent to when things go wrong. But a new model is emerging, one where the goal isn't to build better help desks, but to integrate support into the product experience so seamlessly it becomes invisible.
At Microsoft's Xbox, this new model is being pioneered under the leadership of Ivo Koster, Director of Product Quality and Services. Over the past decade, he has spearheaded a support transformation that converted the Xbox division from a $210M cost center into a $62M AI-powered operation. The move also delivered industry-leading customer satisfaction and sub-4-minute response times.
No controller required: Sub-4 minute response times are impressive, but Koster's vision is for even greater change: "What we're driving for is that support becomes an integral part of the product. You don't go from playing, put your controller down, and then pick your phone up to get help. It's all incorporated so you never have to leave the experience," he says.
Explaining what this looks like in practice, he says, “Let's say you want a refund for a game. It just does it,” Koster explains. “You don't have to go to the website, log in, and find the game. We're moving toward a future where support is completely ambient."
The bot fix: The first breakthroughs are not about grand, futuristic promises, but about elegantly solving what Koster calls “one of our toughest customer experiences: a scratched gift card. Before, you’d call, be told to find the receipt and pictures, hang up, and call back. It was painful.” Now, the process is simple. “You just send a picture, and the bot gets you the code in minutes.”
For Koster, the challenge isn't just technical; it's about ensuring customer perceptions are clear. “Every time we go down this cycle, we come back to the same conclusion: we need to tell the customer it's a bot. Customers have different expectations; when it's a bot, it needs to be quicker, whereas humans are given a little more leeway.”
It's just there, an integrated piece of the experience, not a separate thing you have to seek out. The experience should not feel ripped apart, unless there is a clear benefit for the customer.
Ivo Koster
Director of Product Quality & Services | Microsoft Xbox
Backstage battles: Building that seamless experience requires a massive, often unseen, backend effort to break down internal silos. It's foundational work that must happen long before AI enters the conversation. “In a big company like ours, even a simple scenario—like what a customer owns from us—can involve three different departments,” Koster says. “You have to align the data from authentication, from purchasing, and from entitlements just to get a single view.”
Security by design: So many departments in the mix demands an entirely different approach to building safe products. Koster’s team brings stakeholders in from day one to be active participants in product building versus simply seeing the end result. “Now, we bring them in at the very beginning and say, ‘We want to architect it this way. What do you think?’” That shift in process had a profound cultural effect. “The team sometimes went like, ‘Oh my God, another review,’” he admits. “But when we really switched into, ‘These people are trying to make our solution more secure now,’ that helped the collaboration a lot better.”
From fixers to value-creators: As AI automates up to 80% of transactional volume, it frees up human advocates by taking administrative work like coding and summarizing cases off their plates. With that time back, they can add real value beyond immediate issues and find ways to proactively make customer service better. “We can say, ‘Oh, I see you're playing Need for Speed. Have you tried Forza yet? It's also in your Game Pass.’”
Beyond the console: While this model is a natural fit for Xbox, Koster sees it as the blueprint for customer experience across all industries, where support becomes completely ambivalent. “It's just there, an integrated piece of the experience, not a separate thing you have to seek out. The experience should not feel ripped apart, unless there is a clear benefit for the customer.”
