The life of a 1E Support Tech

When it comes to Customer Service, Support Engineers are often considered as the “Voice and Face” of an organization, and it is no different at 1E Support. For a company that excels in developing IT efficiency products, the onus rests upon us to match that with quality service. Quite understandably, each day is very different to the next, and of course, some days stand out more than others.
The life of a 1E Support Tech is predictably challenging. It’s not just knowing about our product’s functionality inside out, but also having hands on experience with related tools and technologies. It requires a rock solid understanding of the architecture – the binaries that make up the product, how it integrates with Microsoft SCCM, how it communicates with Active Directory and MS SQL server, how they communicate back – and it doesn’t stop there.
Spread across the USA, UK, India and Australia and New Zealand, we are a team of technically motivated engineers catering to a diverse global customer base. A three-tier structure within the team sees each group assigned specific roles and responsibilities to ensure smooth function. While the tier one folks answer customer calls, perform initial investigation and troubleshooting, and other frontline duties, the upper tiers quite predictably have a tough job to do. With their expertise and experience, not only do they mentor the frontline guys and handle escalations, but also work in tandem with the genius world of developers, reviewing codes and strengthening the knowledge base. It becomes increasingly important for us to be in sync with each other and share regular updates. Given our geographic spread many of us in the team have not met all our support colleagues in the flesh. We rely heavily on the ever improving Microsoft Lync’s voice and video calls for our triages and meetings. That being said, we’ve done a great job in sharing our learning and improving as a group – which I think has helped our communication processes.
Time and again we have had to make our own little sacrifices. Working on a holiday, being woken up in the middle of the night for a high priority case, letting go of an evening drink out with co-workers, and I can probably go on and on. However compared to the amount of opportunity we get here to learn, hone our skills, improve and develop, those sacrifices seem worth the cause. At the end of the day, life within the 1E Support team is all very customer focused and, sometimes, a customer appreciation email may just set the right mood for the day 🙂