Technical Account Manager Advocate

Introduction
At IBM work is more than a job – it’s a calling: To build. To design. To code. To consult. To think along with clients and sell. To make markets. To invent. To collaborate. Not just to do something better but to attempt things you’ve never thought possible. Are you ready to lead in this new era of technology and solve some of the world’s most challenging problems? If so lets talk.

Your Role and Responsibilities
As a Technical Account Manager (TAM) Advocate at IBM you will play a pivotal role in ensuring the Day 2 success of IBM Cloud Premium Support customers who are running their most critical workloads on IBM Cloud. You will act as an internal advocate for our customers serving as their voice when issues are being seen. Your primary focus will be to pre-empt understand and troubleshoot customer issues as well as work with the relevant teams in IBM Cloud and across IBM and vendors to provide proactive cloud support as we manage customers’ Day 2 cloud infrastructure environments. The ideal candidate will have a customer-first mindset strong technical acumen with experience of cloud along with excellent communication and facilitation skills required to effectively work across diverse teams to drive to common outcomes and issue resolution at pace.

Responsibilities
You will partner with TAM Advisors Cloud Support other IBM teams and Vendors to ensure the overall success of our customers and IBM. You will be able to understand the issues customers are facing and be driven to speedily resolve those issues and help customers be successful. You must be open to shift work being on-call or potentially being paged out when customers are facing their most critical issues.

Key Responsibilities:
Relationship Management:

• Build and nurture strong collaborative relationships with multiple IBM teams.
• Foster relationships with customer operations teams who are actively using IBM Cloud.
• Perform regular account reviews with IBM teams or customers leveraging data analysis and AI capabilities to uncover both indicators of success and areas for improvement. For example support ticket trends service levels metrics and customer environment performance.

Technical Support Expertise:

• Develop an understanding of your customer’s technical environments challenges and goals.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex technical issues related to cloud services working closely with internal IBM Cloud teams and others as necessary.
• Provide technical guidance and support leveraging your expertise in IBM’s products and services.
• Maintain accurate documentation of customer environments issues and solutions provided.

Issue Resolution:

• Proactively identify and address technical issues speedily working closely with internal and external teams (Technical Support Network Operations Systems Engineering Product Development Product Management other IBM teams IBM Cloud Vendors) to provide timely and effective solutions.

• Serve as an escalation point for critical technical challenges facilitating swift resolution through the collaboration of subject matter experts from diverse teams as necessary.
• During issue resolution
  • gather relevant information from the customer
  • keep the customer informed of key IBM information which may be critical to the resolution of ongoing issues the prevention of future issues or preventing customer escalations.

Communication & Facilitation:

• Clearly communicate complex technical information to both technical and non-technical audiences including Sales & Executive Leadership.
• Co-ordinate and facilitate across various functional teams to support fast issue resolution and outcomes.
• Prepare and present updates to IBM teams on during and after issue resolution and escalations.
• Provide Executive level progress updates and reports on key customer issues and escalations.

Account Growth:

• Identify opportunities to assist customers to leverage additional IBM Cloud services to proactively prevent issues reoccurring and/or future issues arising.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• 5+ yrs. Experience in technical service/relationship management.
• 5+ yrs. Experience in customer facing role or professional consulting role.
• Fundamental knowledge/overview of industry Cloud technologies.
• Excellent problem-solving skills with the ability to troubleshoot complex situations
• Outstanding communication presentation and interpersonal skills with the ability to explain technical concepts/issues their implications and path-to-resolution to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to work independently and manage multiple clients and issues simultaneously.
• Experience of foundational project management and agile methodologies

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

• Previous experience in a customer-facing role with cloud services delivery or consultancy.
• Understanding of System administration/network layouts mid/large IT environments
• PMP/ITIL Foundation/PRINCE2/Agile Methodology certification

Minimum Preferred Education:

• BA/BS technical degree or equivalent work experience