Customer Support
Principal Customer Support Engineer
(Germany and Eastern Europe)
Responsibilities:
Reporting to the Manager of Customer Support, the Principal Customer Support Engineer deals with the more complex support requests and customer issues, demonstrates ownership and takes responsibility for the technical solution, from initial troubleshooting to escalation (as required) through delivery to customer acceptance, handling issues both during and outside working hours.
The Principal Customer Support Engineer takes responsibility for managing his/her own piece of work through to effective completion, meeting specification, time, quality, and cost objectives. He/she is technically knowledgeable and able to handle any customer problem, through either personal involvement or escalation to the appropriate area for resolution.
The Principal Customer Support Engineer has a detailed understanding of all supported products, network elements, third-party components and relevant protocols on the network and provides excellent service to the customer.
The Principal Customer Support Engineer is proactive and innovative, coaching and actively sharing knowledge with customers and colleagues to enable them to develop their technical knowledge and their understanding of the organization and its processes, with the ultimate objective of ensuring a highly skilled Support Department with a reputation as a trusted advisor to our customers. He/she also reviews and improves the current support process, practice and procedures and suggests or develops new processes and procedures as appropriate to increase the efficiency of the support organization.
- Build strong technical and personal relationships with Bytemobile’s customers through daily interaction on the telephone and regular on-site customer visits for issue resolution, meetings or reviews
- Be fully knowledgeable of the procedures and processes of the department and be able to review, develop and improve these procedures and processes
- Actively look for ways to increase knowledge and work performance and competence; assist in training other support engineers and educating customers via tailored technical workshops
- Have a detailed technical knowledge of the operation and process flows of all Bytemobile products, third-party elements such as Solaris OS, and network elements such as Alteon, F5 and Cisco load balancers and switches
- Analyze complex technical faults; identify and implement creative solutions
- Develop competence in the use of all the information systems used in trouble report handling and tools/test equipment required for troubleshooting and resolution
- Design and develop tools and scripts to increase support team efficiency
- Replicate customer issues on internal or customer test platforms and raise Engineering department requests or product bugs where required
- Write detailed descriptions of problems to the designer responsible and answers to the customer on any problem
- Through contract and commercial awareness, be responsible for answering and solving trouble reports within agreed service levels, escalating as appropriate to ensure compliance with contracts and avoid service penalties
- Handle customer-sourced trouble reports, giving advice as necessary on investigative actions that the customer may carry out to fully describe a fault
- Investigate, prepare and validate test specifications to verify product or network upgrade
- Carry out on-site problem investigations as the team leader, assigning and monitoring tasks of other engineers, and providing technical updates and progress reports to support management and account teams
- Minimize customer impact and reactions to adverse and service-affecting problems by demonstrating ownership while using key technical skills and personal soft skills of awareness and diplomacy
- Manage own personal workload and assist more junior colleagues with their customer case load to ensure customer success and satisfaction
- Adhere to knowledge-centric support principles, write KB articles, advise and train less experienced engineers in technical issues, and serve as a subject matter expert in at least two products or technologies
- Actively contribute to the continuous improvement process and the ongoing development of a TQM culture — by, for example, changing behavior and identifying and implementing improvements to processes and activities — and encourage others to do the same
- Participate in out-of-hours on-call rotation
Required Qualifications:
- Minimum eight years’ experience in implementing telecommunication products into wireless or wire-line networks, or diagnostics with such products, for multinational companies
- Intimate knowledge of internet technology and operations, with a minimum five years’ demonstrated core networking experience, including skills in monitoring, debugging, capacity planning, and design
- Minimum five years’ demonstrated web and application-level experience, with skills in protocols such as HTTP/HTML, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, and MAPI
- Minimum four years’ demonstrated mobile networking experience, with skills in CDMA, 1xRTT, GSM, GPRS, PDSN, SGSN, GGSN, and tunneling protocols
- Minimum four years’ IP routing and networking experience in the following areas: VLANs, VPN, GRE, firewalls, NAT, load balancing, OSPF, RIP, and BGP
- Minimum three years’ experience in UNIX (Linux and/or Solaris) administration
- Experience with PERL and HTML programming
- Demonstrated ability to work well under pressure and manage critical situations, influencing without direct authority
- Political astuteness, with understanding of commercial issues and principles
- Outstanding interpersonal and communication skills, both written and verbal, with ability to develop and maintain strong working relationships at all levels both with the customer and internally
- Operational drive, with experience in a results-driven environment
- Strong customer focus, self-motivation and strong team-player skills
