Role Purpose
The successful candidate will work within a team of support engineers focused on resolving our Premier and Partner customers’ technical issues. This requires scoping the customer’s expectations and collaborating with others to meet those expectations in the shortest possible time. This includes providing customers with reliable technical solutions and a consistently exceptional service experience. This involves reactive remote support, working with and collaborating with colleagues in the UK, India, EMEA & US.
The successful candidate will join the UK Developer Support for Databases team, working closely with Engineering Services teams and global escalation teams supporting Microsoft’s Global English customers.
Team/Department Mission
Solve the customer’s problem in the quickest way possible by putting them at the centre of everything we do.
Key Accountabilities
- Communicate with customers, GTSC engineers and appropriate subsidiary staff via electronic correspondence or telephone. Assist with onsite support regarding mission critical problems experienced with the supported technology within your team.
- Solve complex level of problems, involving broad product knowledge or product speciality redirected by GTSC or escalated by subsidiary sites.
- Provide solutions that satisfy customers which will involve handling difficult situations (complaint handling, sensitive customer, mission critical)
- Have a working knowledge of incident based calls tracking tool, i.e. Remedy, Quest, Clarify or MSSOLVE
- Handle incoming escalated incidents varying between low and high call volume.
- Be reactive to higher priority severity incidents initiated by our customers.
- Write technical documents in order to distribute technical information to all Customers.
- Attend and own triage meetings with local and remote GTSC engineers to share knowledge and efficiently develop customer solutions.
- Perform technical mentoring and assisting of GTSC engineers and Technical Account Manager's to ensure the quality of service.
- Assist in hot-site issues by setting customer expectations, devising action plans and communicating to Technical Account Managers, Partners and customers.
- Use sophisticated tools to analyse complex problems and develop solutions to meet customer needs.
- Assist in representing Microsoft in the support community
- Active in driving Market Share
Key Success Criteria
- Ability to delight customers, contribution to team customer satisfaction and utilisation goals
- Excellent team player
- Strong ownership of customer issues
- Realise personal accountability within team
- Ability to take responsibility and react effectively
Knowledge, Skills and Experience
1) Essential Experience
- Excellent written and spoken English
- Technical support (on site and telephone)
- Deep knowledge of product(s) / technologies being supported with proven track record
- Ability to take leadership in one specific product.
- Good communication skills in international environment
- Mature technical skills and proven support experience
2) Technical / Functional Skills
Required:
- Strong knowledge of writing applications that use data access technologies like ADO, ADO.NET, ODBC, OLE DB, etc to access databases like Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle etc.
- Strong knowledge of XML, XML Schemas and XML Transforms
- Strong knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server at developer level (TSQL, Stored Procedures, etc.)
- Good Windows Operating System background on Threads, Processes and Memory Management (Heap, Stack, Virtual Memory)
- Strong knowledge related to any other relational DB (e.g. Oracle) running in a Windows environment is desirable.
- Strong programming skills in C# and VB.NET.
- A working knowledge of the .NET Framework.
- Exposure to the Reporting Services feature set in the Microsoft SQL Server product
Desirable:
- Debugging/creating and reading memory dumps
- Analysing network traces
- Troubleshooting Kerberos configuration issues
- A good working knowledge of C/C++
3) Personal Attributes / Interpersonal Skills
- Customer focused
- Great team player and sharing of best practice
- Technically credible
- Excellent communication skills both spoken and written
- Able to work well under pressure and meet commitments
- Ability to communicate with international customers (cultural awareness)
- Able to work with remote colleagues and customers as part of Global English
- Willingness to work on site with customers as required
4) Qualifications
Desirable: MCSE/MCSD/MCPs, vendor qualifications, professional qualifications
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer and supports workforce diversity.
