Not-so-tall tales from the MFT support desk

When Kostadin Galabov, Senior Director of Technical Customer Support at Axway, and I met over drinks a little while ago, we realized there’s a story we want to tell. It’s one that mostly happens behind the scenes, yet it’s critical to the success of any software implementation.

It’s about the role that Axway’s Support Teams play in making our products work for the people who rely on them.

Knowing how often colleagues in Support go above and beyond for our customers, I think it’s important to give them more visibility. And you’ll want to buckle up, because Kosta has some pretty wild stories to share!

Meet the people behind the Axway MFT support structure

The Sofia, Bulgaria team is responsible for about 90% of SecureTransport support globally. That means that when a ST customer calls Axway, they’ll almost always reach Sofia. They are also 100% responsible for 24×7 dispatcher duties, focusing primarily on Axway’s MFT suite.

“We consist of 35 support professionals, 4 managers, and myself leading the structure, and we work in shifts to cover 20 hours per day, seven days a week. And we have been doing that for 20 years.”

Kosta himself has been with the team since day one – in fact, back then, he WAS the team: “It’s true, I was the support engineer who started it back then, yes!”

Anyone who’s visited the Sofia office can tell you there’s a great #BetterTogether spirit there. In fact, you can see it in this office tour we shared late last year.

Stories from the other side of the support desk

For four years, Kosta wore two hats as both a support engineer and manager. One particular weekend in 2007, when his wife was very pregnant, he was on “On Call Duty.”

“My wife is having a baby, I’m going to need to drop this call”

“This means when something happens on a Saturday or Sunday, you get called into work — or it could be at 5:00 AM in the morning during the business week.”

“I remember this very vividly,” he continues, “because it was my last on-call duty ever; afterwards, there were enough support engineers to take it off my shoulders.”

So, on this day, I went into the office and started working with the customer. After about an hour working with the customer, my wife called me. She told me that her water had broken and I needed to take her to the hospital, because she was going to give birth to our son!”

He went back to the customer and said “Look, my wife is in labor, so I need to pass you over to one of my colleagues – but I’ll stay on for 20 more minutes together until he can take over for me.” The customer said “OK, thank you – you do realize you can only use this excuse once every nine months, though!”

“It’s become an inside joke between my wife and I,” Kosta laughs, “because she’s still giving me a hard time for putting the customer before her, and making her wait 30 minutes before I drove her to the hospital.”

(I would like to point out here that Kosta is an involved father and husband, and everything turned out fine on that day – AND, that we fully support our employees having a healthy work-life balance!)

“That’s definitely the craziest story I have,” Kosta laughs.

Other stories are a true testament to the dedication of our support people here at Axway; there’s no problem they are afraid to tackle.

Overnight visit to London? No problem.

“Ten years ago or so, we had a very large customer in the U.K. that called one Friday night – these calls always come in on a Friday night, of course!

This was a customer we had never heard much from before, and I quickly understood that their environment had been working just fine for years and they hadn’t done much maintenance on it. Unfortunately, something had crashed, and we couldn’t do anything about it remotely due to security parameters.

They told us they needed someone in London first thing in the morning.

At this point, we’re thinking, ‘it’s Friday evening in Sofia, how can we find someone to travel to London right now?’

In an approximately 12-hour period between 8:00 PM on a Friday and 8:00 AM on a Saturday, the customer had to get all their approvals to pay for one of us to fly out there, while we scrambled to identify a senior support staffer who could drop their life for a week and get on a plane.

But we found the guy, and he got to London, helped resolve the issue, and ended up returning to Sofia 10 days later.”

I was glad to hear Kosta confirm that they are still a customer to this day!

A real-life escape room scenario

Another time, two teammates – a support member and someone from R&D – needed to fly to an Asia Pacific company that needed help with an issue on-site.

“The customer was very insistent that we solve the problem for them while our two teammates were there. They half-joked, ‘You’re not leaving the premises until you solve this.’ Except that, as our teammates approached 4 hours before their plane was scheduled to depart, they still hadn’t succeeded in solving it!”

At this point, Kosta says, they started to get a little nervous. For one, this was a very high-security facility, so it was standard practice to leave all your personal items – including passports! – at the front desk.

“My support teammate told me he laughed off the comment, but genuinely started to worry they might be stuck as the clock continued to tick away.”

Thankfully, with about two hours left to spare, they managed to resolve the issue and get onto their plane back to Sofia on time – passports in hand.

We also reflected on how much things have changed post-Covid-19; before remote work became so ubiquitous, Kosta says it was harder for customers to trust his team taking things in hand remotely.

Nowadays, barring a few high-security exceptions, a lot of these wild travel scenarios are less frequent.

Axway Support is an integral part of our solution

Another thing that has changed since those early days is that as Support has accompanied customers in their journey, they’ve been able to integrate their observations and customer feedback into Axway’s roadmap and processes.

It truly goes beyond a siloed Support department processing tickets without taking into account the overarching issues that might need addressing from a product standpoint.

“The way we work with R&D and Product Management teams at Axway is a very tight collaboration – we talk with each other, both officially and unofficially, all the time. They listen to us when it comes to our product’s usability and ways to improve our solutions so customers can really take advantage of their value in the long run.”

One example of how R&D leverages the Support team’s input?

SecureTransport currently deploys with default settings that are targeted to a relatively minimally powered environment. But Kosta’s team have found that many newer customers today are powering their hardware a little bit higher than what it used to be 10-15 years ago.

“These default settings are insufficient for what the customers expect from our product, and it’s something that impacts new environments where once they deploy them, put them in production, they will suddenly discover that these environments cannot process as much load as customers would like them to. It’s not because the product cannot support it, but simply because the default is set up for a minimum set of requirements.”

Because Support has been fielding these calls to help new customers recalibrate their product, they’re now working with R&D to create a default setting that’s better tuned to modern environments already.

Empowering customers with self-service

We’ve undertaken quite a few initiatives to help customers become proficient and empowered to solve their own challenges, with things like Axway University, rich documentation, and our support portal.

“Our credo is that once we work on a problem, that problem never happens again,” adds Kosta. “We work together with customers to help them better maintain their systems, yes, but the long-term goal is to make them truly independent.

“We take pride in what we’re doing. Our goal is not only to address the symptoms of a problem; we want to really go deep into the weeds and solve the underlying issue once and for all.

Ultimately, we want to have fewer and fewer cases where support is needed, looking at problems in a holistic way and publish Knowledge Base articles so that customers can take advantage of the years of experience our team members have.”

There’s no doubt that this team’s dedication to getting results goes above and beyond. And it shows. About this time last year, Kosta shared on LinkedIn a simple email that sums it all up.

That heartfelt thank you means a lot to our people who work tirelessly to support customers – and it helps us renew our commitment to your success.

“At the end of the day,” Kosta jokes, “my goal is to make my entire department obsolete! We want to help empower people to do what they need to do, and make our solutions work for them.

Maybe customers will get so good with our solutions that we can take the entire Sofia office out to an ocean-side retreat to celebrate!”

We hope this gives you a better sense of the dedication and commitment of our support team when you call them or benefit from their expertise on our support portal.