Introduction
As a Storage Protect Technical Support Specialist, you will be working as part of the Storage Support team, providing remote technical support to contracted IBM clients for reported software defect and non-defect issues. Support is provided across the range of Storage Data Protection software products, running on multiple platforms, as well as to connected devices such as hardware storage and networking. Service is mostly delivered remotely by phone support or Teams meetings with the client.

As a potential candidate, you will have a general interest in technology, together with a track record of excellent client handling skills, within a support environment. You will have relevant technical experience, excellent communication and listening skills as well as a confident and professional telephone manner. You should be a highly self-motivated individual, who works well under pressure.

Your Role and Responsibilities
Primary Role:
To provide day to day remote technical support to contracted IBM clients via telephone, email and Teams meetings – with a high level of client satisfaction. As part of a virtual support team you will; create and maintain call and problem histories using the Cognitive Support Platform (CSP) for worldwide visibility and application. You will use your specialised Storage Protect skills, knowledge and experience for the problem investigation, progression and quick resolution. You will be the case owner and provide timely and effective management of the client’s technical problem, and resolution expectation. You will contribute to overall team objectives and operational targets e.g. utilisation and customer satisfaction.

Key responsibilities:

• Providing end to end remote technical support for Storage Protect family suite – if not already an SME, then progression towards this level will be provided for career development.
• Performing Problem Determination, Problem Source Identification, and Support on these products and operating systems.
• Involving colleagues or Development where required, and assisting in technical escalation procedures, when necessary, whilst maintaining ownership of the problem for the client.
• Handling of critical situations and management of escalations.
• Ensuring service level commitments are met, clients are kept fully informed of progress and deadlines are maintained when escalating problems.
• Prevent any customer dissatisfaction by actively managing their problem.
• Co-ordinating the problem management process and managing commitments made to IBM clients whilst balancing them with IBM operational business requirements.
• Using support centre tools (Technotes, CSP) for information research, retrieval and investigation as well as accurate logging and progression of problem records.
• Achieving personal and team targets, including Hours Per Problem, Utilisation and Client Satisfaction.
• Support colleagues, Team Leader and Management to achieve the business and operational objectives.
• Taking on of extra duties when and as necessary in response to evolving service requirements and/or ad-hoc special support needs, eg out of hours support cover and/or special client contract assistance.
• Provide weekend duty coverage to WW SP clients for severity 1 cases.
• Share your knowledge – provide skill transfers to educate others in the team on your areas of responsibility, develop a wider appreciation of the operation and help grow colleagues to enable suitable cover for your primary role during periods of absence or high workload peaks.

The role is a hybrid role, a mixture of being office based and working from home. A degree of personal flexibility and mobility will also be required (work location and working hours) depending on business requirements.

General/Professional:

• Self Starter, able to act on own initiative in customer service situations, apply good judgement and take ownership.
• Reliable and committed team player, able to operate effectively across local and geographically spread teams.
• Track record of applying sound problem determination, deductive reasoning and problem source identification techniques to a variety of products and OS environments.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken (English), and a very professional telephone manner.
• Good personal administrative and housekeeping standards.
• Excellent personal time keeping and attendance record.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• Administrator level knowledge of current Storage Protect versions
• 2+ years of experience within Product Support for IBM Storage Protect
• SME skill level on the product to be qualified to support our customers end to end / or equivalent experience.
• Good working knowledge of “Containers, Deduplication, node replication and Protection
• Ability to perform Performance diagnosis (ability to trace threads)”
• Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology or equivalent product experience level
• Participate in the World Wide weekend rota.
• English: Written and verbal, fluent
• German: written and verbal, B2-C1

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

• Knowledge of DB2, VMWare, Virtual Environments, SAN, Cloud connectivity and Tape drives, would be useful to the candidate.
• Skills, experience and general understanding with all, should be well established. Operating Systems, eg AIX, Windows, Linux are also needing to be of a high level
• Experienced technical support role in a “backup & restore” capacity