Everything we say and do, we say and do with confidence – and for good reason. This confidence is duly warranted because all OxTS products are relentlessly tested before we deem them ‘customer ready’, and we provide ongoing advice and support to enable customers to get the best from their OxTS solutions. Support Engineer, Lily Munn, helps customers on a daily basis. Here she shares a ‘day in her life’:
1. When did you join OxTS, and what appealed to you about working for the Company?
I joined OxTS in the summer of 2018, straight after I graduated university with my physics degree. While at university my final year project was to make an inertial navigation system (INS), so when I found out about OxTS it seemed like a good fit for me, because I already understood roughly what the OxTS products were, and the benefits they offer to our customers. This and the opportunity to travel were what drew me to OxTS.
2. What’s a ‘typical’ day at work for you, as an OxTS Support Engineer?
My days recently have been a bit different due to the Covid pandemic lockdowns, but the work I do is still the same. When I first log on to my computer each morning, I check to see if I’ve received any customer responses on my open support tickets and, of course, then I reply as needed. Then normally we have a support team ‘coffee meeting’. Which is an informal catch up where our whole team talks about the work we are doing, and we have opportunity to ask each other questions and share knowledge. After this, depending on the day, I spend my time either testing software and/or hardware, and/or conducting data analysis to provide solutions for customers who have raised support tickets. I work across the whole product range and support customers with survey and mapping products, automotive, and I’m also a specialist support engineer for customers seeking an integrated INS solution so my work is quite varied.
3. What’s the best thing about your job?
The best part of my job is being able to travel for work. I enjoy meeting customers and seeing new places. I have been able to travel to the US to help trouble-shoot customer projects, and to be involved with the US AutoDrive competition. I’ve also provided customer training in Hungry.
As the global pandemic has limited our abilities to visit customers and provide face-to-face demonstrations and guidance as we usually would, I have been presenting webinars. These are normally hour-long sessions where a member of the support team goes through the software, or a particular set up, and then answer any questions. We select topics based on the most common issues customers ask us about, and on customer feedback. (More information on the webinars can be found here).
4. What’s the most challenging thing about being an OxTS Support Engineer and how do you manage this?
Troubleshooting with customers during their testing is most challenging. For example, sometimes our team will get calls from customers who have found an issue while they are testing, and so naturally they want immediate resolution so that they can get back to work. This puts a lot of time pressure on my job, to get them back up and working as soon as possible so they don’t waste their time. After three years of being an OxTS support engineer, I have become fairly knowledgeable so I am able to help immediately in most cases. For the most unusual issues, I can call on our navigation and electronic teams for further assistance. Fortunately, there is a great deal of technical expertise within the OxTS team.
5. What do you enjoy most about being part of the OxTS team?
The best thing about being part of OxTS is friendly environment, so I feel comfortable asking for help when needed. There is a team spirit and people genuinely want to help each other. This is true within the support team, and also the whole OxTS company. In my role I work with people from the engineering, navigation, commercial, and other teams on a regular basis. Between us, we represent a wide range of demographics, but we are all passionate about delivering the best possible quality, so that customers can trust the results and measure with confidence when they use OxTS products.
6. What are you most looking forward to working on over the next 12 months?
For the next 12 months, my focus is to improve customer support. Our team are working on an SQL RD file database to enable us to locate relevant information quickly when supporting customers with similar queries. When government advice enables us to do so, I’m looking forward to returning to the office and working with my colleagues again. Although we’re in regular contact via Skype and other digital platforms at the moment, having a face-to-face coffee will be really nice. I’m also working on hardware testing of forthcoming projects – some of which I can’t discuss openly yet, but I’m looking forward to revealing more when we reach that stage.
Further resources:
- You can follow this link to visit our technical support centre at any time.
- To participate in support webinars presented by Lily and her colleagues, please click here.
