Officer: Lead: End User Support Engineer (post level 10/11) at University of the Free State

Duties and responsibilities:

People Management    

•    Ensure to  spearhead a team of support agents providing 1st line technical support through telephonic and remote desktop connection sessions.
•    Help service desk agents to resolve support tickets (Incident/Task) by acting as a point of escalation for difficult/advanced technical support issues.
•    Handle all advance support issues when service desk agents have exhausted all possible solutions.
•    Identify and highlight best practices in support and contribute this to a knowledge base system.
•    Participate in client meetings for escalated issues to provide faster resolution.
•    Motivate and assist team members in reaching individual and team goals for quality, productivity and user satisfaction.
•    Ensure team members resolve all assigned support ticket courteously and in a timely manner.
•    Coordinate the service desk team members in their daily duties of attending to clients who come to make inquiries.
•    Create a mode of operations to be adhered to by team members in order to maintain good routine and orderliness.
•    Delegate specific service desk responsibilities to team members to create specialisation and increase service delivery pace.
•    Observe service desk operation techniques to determine how effective they are and implement new techniques if necessary.
•    Review performance reports, service improvements, services quality, and processes.
•    Provide management and performance reports.

Client Relationship Management    

•    Facilitate good customer service culture in team members.
•    Develop a strong working relationship with clients, partnerships and colleagues.
•    Provide a structured, informative and support experience with timely and clear communication.
•    Deliver regular high-quality communications with End users during service interruptions to their systems e.g. outages, reductions, etc.
•    Focus on managing communications across End users and IT supporters to ensure that incidents are dealt with by priority and End-user needs.
•    Evaluate and assess service delivery performance metrics.
•    Monitor and analyse customer needs, feedback and services rendered to determine the levels of service delivery.
•    Manage the performance of services to customers.
•    Ensure that service levels are achieved in line with SLA's and that user expectations are met or exceeded.
•    Build services relationship with customers and conduct service reviews for key customers

Incident Management    

•    Manage the life cycle of all incidents that affect the service provided to End users, allocating Incidents that cannot be resolved by the service desk to second- or third-line support resources and coordinating the response of these resources.
•    Manage support tickets escalation which ultimately results in client satisfaction ratings.
•    Follow-up on all support tickets to ensure team members align themselves with operational SLA's (Service Level Agreements).
•    Maintain a high level of service delivery by monitoring all assigned technical support tickets/request.
•    Monitor logged incoming incidents and requests, to ensure that these are diagnosed and escalated properly.
•    Liaise with the Service Desk Manager/SLA and OPS Manager to escalate major incidents for them to get the required attention.
•    Monitor incident queues to identify potential SLA breaches and contact relevant supporter or expediter within the groups to highlight any key SLAs that may or has breached.
•    Manage critical customers incidents, associated with customer communication, activities and any appropriate escalations.
•    Provide information about incidents analysis and KPls.

Inherent requirements:

•    A Bachelor’s degree or an advanced diploma/BTech degree/postgraduate certificate on NQF Level 7 in Information Technology/Technical Support or a closely related field, or a three-year national diploma on NQF Level 6 in Information Technology/Technical Support or a closely related field.
•    Minimum two (2) years’ relevant working experience related to the duties and responsibilities. 
•    A+/N+ Certification.

Recommendations:

•    Knowledge of:
  •      How software and operating systems work.
  •     IT services theories and best practices.
•    MCSE/Apple Certified Professional/MCSA/MCP would be advantageous. 
•    Must be a team player and able to work collaboratively with and through others.
•    Acute business acumen and understanding of organizational issues and challenges.
•    Familiarity with project management approaches, tools, and phases of the project lifecycle. 
•    Change management certification or designation desired.