Listen to the Experts :: My Week at Work

Who are you?

Name:
Mayte Cubino Gonzalez

Age:
29

Job title:
Customer Support Engineer

Employer:
Cisco TAC

Customer Support Engineer

Mayte is a Customer Support Engineer at Brussels TAC (Technical Assistance Center) and has shared with us a week's diary in the Data Network Group (DNG) team, with a focus on Core Architecture technologies. In TAC you will never get "bored of the routine", as they are always open to unexpected challenges.

Monday:

I am on shift from 9.00 am until 12.30 am . Being on shift means accepting ownership of the new cases that our customers are opening and reporting issues on their Cisco equipment on a global level. By the end of the shift, I have taken 3 cases and after having established communication already with all my new customers I am going to have lunch in our canteen.

Back from lunch. One of my customers from the morning has sent me the information needed, so I will resume my research on this case. As soon as I finish, I will keep working on the other cases I have in my backlog from the other days. Even if we would love to fix all problems immediately, it takes time to gather all the information and find the solution.

It is a bit later than 5 pm (end of the day here at TAC) but I still want to give a call to a customer so as to arrange a Webex session tomorrow morning and then I will head home.

Tuesday:

Today I am not on shift, so I can focus on working on the cases I have in my backlog. The first thing in the list is the Webex session, where my customer will connect to their routers and share desktop with me so I can take control and perform live troubleshooting. This is quite a complex case, CEF load-balancing on ASR routers, and gathering this information is very important. Next step, request the same equipment in our lab in order to duplicate the same scenario and reproduce the same problem.

Wednesday:

This day is going to be slightly different. Shift in the morning, this time starting at 8 am until 12.30 am. I am crossing fingers not to be stuck on the phone with a highest priority case since this afternoon I have a customer visit.

After lunch I meet with a group of engineers who work for one of our partners in The Netherlands to have a chat about our role here, how we work and how we could improve our interaction with them.

As 5.30pm we have an internal meeting with our Director, so until then I will keep working in the lab hoping to be able to reproduce the same issue, which will be the key for a prompt resolution.

Thursday:

I am going to start the day calling my customer (the one that I am doing the lab tests for) since he is based in Australia and I don't want to disturb him in his late-night due to the time difference. I will update him on my progresses in the lab and my discussions with the Business Unit about his issue.

At 4pm we have a chalk-talk with our escalation engineer before finishing up for the day.

Friday:

Last day of the week, this time to end with an afternoon shift from 12.30 to 4 pm. From 2 pm we only support EMEA customers since our colleagues from RTP (US) are already covering the rest of the world.

Until then, I continue to answer my customer's emails and also discuss with one of the Specialists in our team about one case I have, where I want to double-check with him my findings. If there is something that defines TAC in capital letters that is "teamwork". There are a lot of things that you have to learn, and most of the times we have to learn it on the hard way, but thanks to the great team that each of us have supporting us, this process is easier and gratifying.

At 1 pm, the broadcast line (for p1/p2 cases) starts ringing and it's my turn for shift. The case is a Severity 1 for a Maintenance Window where the customer is upgrading the IOS in a Core device on an ISP and is facing some issues. I immediately create a Webex session so I can follow up on the IOS upgrade and jump to help the customer resolve the case.

Before the weekend starts for me, I review my backlog and make sure I have updated all my cases and replied to all the emails I have received. Last call to a US customer who at this time is already awake to check how is the router performing after the replacement.

Next week, new cases with new challenges, new customers and more experiences to learn, live and enjoy.

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