Tech support is no second fiddle job: MS

Technical support is often perceived as any usual help desk job that demands replying a series of queries with a given set of answers. Companies like Microsoft are unraveling this perception so as to attract the best talent to solve arduous problems that customers might encounter. 

Underscoring the fact that technical support is not the second best job, Microsoft Global Technical Support Center

(GTSC) Asia Pacific MD Manish Sinha said, "Technical support is a very high-end job where support personnel do not deal with childish problems but with serious queries, which couldn't be handled by the respective organization's

CIOs, CTOs and developers."

Manish further informed that there's a perception problem that technical support is any other normal job falling under the purview of

ITeS. "Contrastingly, it's altogether a different job requiring a judicious mix of technical knowledge, diagnostic and communication skills. We at Microsoft have around 170 products and the kind of technical knowledge a support personnel needs to have is quite vast," he explained.

Talking about the trends in customer support service, Manish noted, "As customers increasingly adopting complex technologies, the complexities of the problems also increase. Equally, heterogeneity (in terms of coordinating with various partners as customers may bundle Microsoft products with other products) is increasing.” On the sales front, Microsoft competes with its partners, but at the backend, it needs to coordinate with various partners so as to diagnose the problem its customer encounters.

"So we need to have support groups with a right mix of talent who have expertise in various products and team up as and when customers' encounter some problems. And these are problems that developers or project managers themselves couldn't solve," opined Manish.

SUNITHA NATTI 



CYBERMEDIA NEWS SERVICE