A Tuesday in the life of a Regional Technical Support Manager

Harini Sudarshan

APAC Technical Support Manager for Ping Identity

What exactly does a regional technical support manager’s role entail? For me, it’s always been about customer advocacy, ensuring the ongoing success of the business the team serves, whilst striving to provide it with a delightful support experience. Without an expert product support team, it’s impossible for a software vendor to deliver effective solutions to customers, no matter how cutting edge their products may be.

The software vendor I work for, Ping Identity, has support centres strategically located in Denver, Melbourne and London; a configuration that allows us to deliver follow-the-sun (24x7) support.

What I love most about my job is leading a team of talented engineers and assisting our customers with their identity and access management (IAM) challenges. As a technical support manager, I have to be always abreast of all new product releases and the enhancements they contain. My role encompasses staying on top of global support operations, being across low to high severity issues reported by customers, and collaborating and communicating with cross-functional teams including product, engineering and account management to ensure alignment. Our team supports around 1500 customers across various industry verticals including banking, healthcare, retail, auto and insurance. We assist our customers with the implementation of single sign-on, directory, cloud-based authentication and authorisation solutions as well as multi-factor authentication products.

Our support team plays a major role in addressing integration with third party products such as Google, Facebook and AWS using our out-of-the-box integration kits.

The majority of our customers are large enterprises, and maintaining 100 per cent uptime and minimising security breaches of their applications is crucial to their business. Also, enabling them to roll out applications rapidly and securely in turn improves their agility and productivity.

It’s challenging to describe a typical day in support because there just isn’t one! Every day is unique and interesting. Every support case we receive is different and presents an opportunity for learning and skills development.

My day starts at 5.30am, when I get ready to attend a (virtual) meeting where I connect with the other regional managers.

During the day, I manage all aspects of day-today operations for my team of 10 engineers. That includes identifying trends, and analysing and reporting on our approaches to support cases. This data influences the continuous development of our processes, ensures we provide the highest standards

of customer support, and exceed our service level agreement and target metrics. In my team management role I facilitate customer meetings, set priorities for the team, convene a daily huddle, hold 1:1 meetings with team members, coach engineers, and plan professional development.

I follow Steven’s Covey’s Third Principle, ‘First things first’, to plan my days and weeks and that’s worked well for me over the past few years. Planning helps me stay focused and allows me to tackle unpredictable situations. I rarely miss preparing for the next day’s management meeting, which assists me immensely in those early morning meetings. Regular exercise and healthy eating help me to stay consistent with my routine. I’m fortunate to live in a suburb surrounded by beautiful walking trails, and I love to use them. It is important to me not to compromise on spending quality time with family. I talk with my parents and sister almost every day and unwind by watching sitcoms with my husband for at least 30 minutes a day.

Effective self-development doesn’t occur by accident. Every Tuesday I attend a review meeting with my life coach and members of her professional community. Like me, are all eager to learn and grow. We share our successes from the previous week and talk about a gamut of engaging topics.

5:30am: The alarm goes off and I start the day with a 10-minute meditation. I’m not a tea or coffee person, but I drink a lot of water in the morning, and that helps me stay focused. Then I take a few minutes to think about the day ahead. Going through my daily planner and checking on pending action items from the previous day helps me visualise the important tasks to be accomplished that day.  6:00am: I’m at my desk and starting on my emails, catching up with the essential updates from my colleagues in North America. A stack of additional tasks gets added to my daily planner at this stage. Then, at 6.30am, I join my first meeting with colleagues in the US and the UK.  8:00am: Time for a quick breakfast. It’s the first of several mini-breaks throughout the day, which help me restart and re-energise.  8:30am: My team comes online, and we start on the day-to-day work. To begin, I go through the support case queue, assess the priority support cases and handovers from the other regions, and assign work to engineers. In parallel, I am always working on process improvements.  12:00pm: It’s important to keep yourself abreast of the latest trends and practices in technology, leadership and soft skills. I try to squeeze in a short training video between my meetings. It’s motivating, and a reminder that there’s always room to improve. The second half of my day is usually spent on meetings with my team and customers.  1:00pm: Daily team huddle and a few other meetings.  2:00pm: Break time. I make a light lunch with fresh juice and eat it watching the latest news, then go for a walk or a run.  3:30pm: It’s getting towards knock-off time and that means it’s time for me to write a summary of the day, to reflect on what I’ve learnt and plan for the next one. I conduct a final overview of the work we’ve finalised and complete a comprehensive handover for our colleagues in London.  5:00pm: Every Tuesday I attend a call with my coach and other community members. We share our wins and discuss our goals for the next week. There’s usually a theme for the discussion, set by the coach each month.  6:00pm: I don my apron and it’s Master Chef time! My family loves different cuisines and I love cooking for them. It’s a great way to transition from work to home life. We end the day watching light comedy on Netflix before heading to bed at 10:00pm.