Introduction
Cloud Support Engineering is a 24/7/365 role. This means that there is always a Cloud Support Engineer available when you need one. Companies that hire CSEs use what is called the “Follow the Sun” model. These companies have distributed teams covering all the time zones. Each team has its core hours when it is highly available to work on a customer-facing queue. During this set of hours, the team attends to emails, chat requests and calls from customers.
The Day
| Period | Duration | Activities |
| Pre-Core Hours | 1 – 2 hours | – Daily Standup – Respond to customer correspondences – Clear personal backlog – Follow-up on previous correspondence – Wrap up and close resolved issues – Contact customers who previously had a poor experience |
| Core Hours | 3 – 4 hours | – Stay highly available – Monitor the queue – Attend to customers in all channels – The objective is to take the customer out of his pain as quickly as possible and do a deep-dive later |
| Post-Core Hours | 2 – 3 hours | – Send call summaries – Deep dives and root-cause analysis – Team meetings – Training and mentorship – Updating Documentation and Standard operating procedures (SOPs) – Cross-team collaborative projects – Interviewing – 1:1 Meetings with managers |
Conclusion
The above list is nowhere near exhaustive. Support Engineers create the tools they use to assist customers and also drive product innovation. Due to their role in interacting directly with customers, Support Engineers tend to know better about the customers than other teams like the Software engineers. This puts them in a better position to drive to innovate on behalf of the customer.