Meet the Axway Escalation Group

The Axway Escalation Group is a mostly internal support team whose role is to provide various experts to help support solving cases and also handles communication with R&D. Most of the team comes from diverse backgrounds, support, R&D, professional services, etc.

The team is split geographically between France, the United States, India, and a few other countries with individuals without a big local support center, or sometimes not even an Axway office nearby.

The group has deeper technical expertise on specific subjects while support teams’ knowledge may be more general. But there are exceptions and some engineers are also choosing to be in support because they enjoy customer contact. However, most of the team regularly ends up speaking on WebEx to help and discuss details directly with customers.

Axway Escalation Group: support and role

Helping and giving support is a big part of the group’s activity with one major difference: customers are supported locally, but the Escalation Group has no local requirement unless the time difference doesn’t fit the context.

Furthermore, there are other activities, like creating and validating knowledge contents (KB articles, etc.), doing health-checks of customer environments either as part of MCS contract or paid activities.

Many Escalation Group engineers meet weekly with specific Research and Development (R&D) teams to discuss progress and prioritization of customer defects. There are also occasional trainings organized by the team mostly for a target of support engineers and with the purpose of better supporting the product.

Products

Not every product is covered under the Axway Escalation Group. The historic Tumbleweed products such as SecureTransport and Mailgate, for instance, have L3 support that takes over regular support quickly or from the very beginning depending on severity, complexity, etc.

Some products have neither L3 nor the Escalation Group and there can be multiple reasons for this – from a limited number of customers, most customers located in the same area, lack of expertise justifying an additional level of support or enough expertise already. That’s how some products stopped being covered by the Escalation Group.

Differences with regular support

There are some differences between the new products. Support management of team knowledge is different because the managers have to build the knowledge of their engineers, often from scratch. In the Escalation Group, this knowledge is often there and has more to be maintained/expanded.

When Axway releases a new product, the team must learn all the details and be ready to provide support in a fast-track manner. The team may be involved early on to help build knowledge content and also learn faster. This was the case with Central Governance. However, the team size is limited, so we pick some new products and leave others to regular support.

Support level investment: Pros and Cons

Generally, having an additional support level in place is helpful, but we must be careful. The bridge between helpful and bottleneck can be narrow. Support comes down to contacting us for help. If the team is not available or tied up with another customer, the issues can become problematic. Support will pass to us a part of customer pressure, and ideally, we can set priorities correctly with R&D without wearing them out. Developing and maintaining trust with R&D helps in the long run and several team members have been in their position for more than ten years. Currently, we have a low churn rate.

The future is wide open!

When the team was created, we had no Cloud team in place and many of our current products hadn’t been released (B2Bi, CG) or acquired (API Gateway, Decision Insight, etc.).

Currently, the environment is getting more diverse and complex with Cloud, hosted environments, containers, third-party support, etc. Overall, there will always be a need for knowledge, as well as knowledge management in the long term.