Leadership Interview Prep — How did you handle a difficult situation?
Situation:
One of our Global production support Lead left the organization, He was working very closely with our Client support team.
Everyone on our cross functional team were worried as he was handling the day to day support requests.
Task:
Our CTO came to me asked if I can lead the support team and handle support requests from Business users and Client Support teams till the time we have a new support lead.
Action:
I know its difficult task to handle as it involves constant support to few of our busy teams along with my current responsibilities, but I have always wanted to streamline the support process so I took this as a challenge. I have done 3 things to handle situation
- I have reached out to 4 of our busiest client support reps who were working closely with support lead and understood most important and time sensitive activities he used to handle. I assured them they can reach out to me anytime and I will get the work done on priority.
- I have setup calls with our support team in offshore to understand the process they follow to handle these requests during their time zone.
- I observed that there were multiple manual tasks that can be automated and quality issues that can be fixed proactively instead of receiving request to fix them. I worked with our engineering team to automate some of the issues and to create a very simple self servicing screen for them.
Result:
As result no of client/support issues reduced drastically, they did not even feel the absence of our support lead infact they were happy that we were able to address existing issues.
Learning:
Even though it feels like challenging task and overwhelming in the beginning , if we can get into the problem and divide it into actionable items, we can handle and excel in any situation.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
I will be posting Questions on daily basis, please follow me for content on Interview prep and data engineering topics.
