OxTS has some of the most knowledgeable experts in the field among our team, and equally importantly, our team is staffed with people who care. When you buy an OxTS product, our dedicated support engineers are here to provide help and advice to enable you to accurately measure position, orientation and dynamics in all environments. For our customers, we are problem solvers. We provide direct, engineer-to-engineer relationships to ensure you get the best solutions to your need, or challenge. Here Kit Behard, one of our support engineers, shares some insights into his work.
1. How long have you worked at OxTS, and have you seen many changes during your time here?
I have been at OxTS for nearly two years and in that time I have been involved in plenty of major changes. It was only a couple of months after I had started that Multi-Sensor Points were added as RT-Range functionality, to validate multiple sensors in a single test. Following that, our configuration and post-processing applications, NAVconfig and NAVsolve, both received a major facelift. Most recently of course has been the release of the next generation of RTs, with onboard WiFi, internal NTRIP clients, and other useful features.
2. What’s the best thing about your current role at OxTS?
I enjoy the varied nature of being a support engineer. I rarely get two support tickets which are the same and some will require data analysis or practical investigation – maybe even some coding. There will be days spent testing software, other days spent collecting data for hardware testing. I enjoyed my degree for the same reason. Before I started at OxTS I studied physics which had a very similar variety of activities e.g. wide range of lecture modules, laboratory sessions and computing classes.
3. What are your key responsibilities as an OxTS support engineer?
Post-sales support to customers is the top priority of a support engineer. All other responsibilities fit around this. It is only after I’ve responded to all of our customer support tickets that I can start spending my time on other projects. The other shared responsibilities of support engineers are product testing and customer training. On top of this, each engineer will have their own projects/investigations ongoing that are relevant to their specific skill-set.
4. You provide support for customers in many different ways, depending on the customers’ needs – which do you find are usually the most effective?
Face-to-face training is always the most effective way to ensure the customer can get the best performance out of their equipment and understand what is happening when things go wrong. This leads to customers being able to quickly troubleshoot problems by themselves. We are trying to replicate this experience through the webinar series that we have been hosting recently. The other ways customers can reach out to us are by phone or online (via email or through our support site). Unless you know it is a complex issue that may involve some data analysis (in which case it is better to get in touch online and send in the data straight away) then I would recommend phoning in.
5. What are the most interest projects you’re currently working on, and why are they your current favourites?
I have found working on the webinars to be an interesting experience. They provide a new opportunity to interact with customers which is especially important at this time when the pandemic is preventing us performing any customer training face-to-face. I’m also currently getting ready to test some new features that I can’t reveal at the moment, and it’s always exciting to experiment with new technology.
6. What are the most challenging sorts of customer queries you deal with, and how do you provide those customers with what they need?
I communicate with all parts of the OxTS business but especially product management, and research and development teams. If I receive a difficult query that is beyond the knowledge of myself and my colleagues in the support team, I will reach out to one of these departments. I will then work with that department to further investigate the issue until it is resolved. Sometimes that involves recreating the environment of the customer and analysing the data or troubleshooting a script the customer is using which interacts with an OxTS device. These investigations can lead to bespoke solutions for individuals -recommended settings or workflows – or even software enhancements to be included in future releases.
You can visit our technical support centre at any time via this link.
