A day in the life of a Technical Account Manager at Esri Canada

My name is Rahul and I’ve been a Technical Account Manager with Esri Canada since 2017. Technical Account Manager can mean different things to different organizations, but at Esri Canada the position of Technical Account Manager or TAM for short, is closely linked to our Premium Support Services program.

How I Got my Start

“Okay Rahul, we have a client who has recently completed a project implementing the largest enterprise geodatabase in the country and is transitioning to Technical Support. They’re encountering severe performance problems with versioning workflows and we’d like you to act as continuity between the different tickets they open for these problems.” 

When I’d finished laughing at what my Manager had just said and realized they were serious, we started having a discussion about what the role might entail.

Although our Premium Support program did exist at the time, there were few clients formally participating and the role of the Technical Account Manager hadn’t been defined yet. The client in question was not on Premium Support, but was interested in purchasing it. The idea was that we’d give this a try for a few months with me acting as this nebulously defined “Technical Account Manager” and see what kind of value it added for the customer.

Having worked in Esri Canada Technical Support for five years at that point I was no stranger to high pressure problems, but this was a different challenge altogether. Providing continuity, guidance and the ability to include additional resources at different times to ensure we left no stone unturned along the way, we were able to work together with the client to effectively resolve their issues. That client and I have been working together in Esri Canada’s Premium Support program ever since.

The Need for Something More

When I started working at Esri Canada in 2012, the use of GIS wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today.

In the last twelve years that I’ve worked in Technical Support our clients have accomplished some amazing things with our products. From fighting unprecedented levels of forest fires to deploying next generation technologies that help improve quality of life, our clients are always finding ways to push the industry and technology forward.

Since many products these days allow you to work with them through a web browser (what Esri calls the Web GIS Pattern), it’s had an effect of opening up the use of GIS to end-users that would never have interacted with it otherwise, and that’s really exploded the number of people that rely on Esri technology for essential parts of their jobs.

Clients’ needs have grown with their accomplishments, however, and it’s becoming increasingly the case that some organizations can thrive with a level of support beyond what we would normally provide. These clients are the reason that TAMs exist.

Premium Support

The Premium Support Services program at Esri Canada comes with many perks, but there’s generally four that we typically discuss when talking about the value the program can add to prospective clients:

• One-hour initial response time for Premium cases (the standard is one business day)

• Access to 24/7 Technical Support for Premium cases (standard support hours are 8am to 8pm Eastern Time)

• Case prioritization (cases marked as Premium are always handled by senior Esri Canada Technical Support resources)

• Dedicated Technical Account Manager

The first three are relatively self-explanatory, but the role of the TAM is worth explaining further.

A Partner in Your Technical Success

In the same way that Esri Canada employs roles like the Strategic Advisor and the Customer Success Manager to encourage success by ensuring our clients are given every opportunity to be successful in linking their business goals to project-based initiatives, the role of the TAM is to help clients get the most out of their interactions through Technical Support.

We do this in a few different ways.

Continuity between Cases

Part of my role as a TAM is understanding the environments that my Premium Support clients are working with. This means having architecture diagrams with information like software versions, underlying versions of databases and operating systems and any specialty configurations that would deviate from a non-standard implementation of Esri technology, such as the use of custom load-balancers or reverse proxies.

Our Salesforce ticketing system also allows us to “subscribe” to notifications for our Premium Support customer accounts, so every time one of my clients opens a new support ticket, I get a notification through e-mail that the new ticket has been logged. I can then take a few minutes to go in, read the initial case details and provide the analyst working on the case with any background about the environment that might help save some back and forth on gathering those details.

Over time, because we’re working with the same group of contacts, we also get a sense of the types of cases clients have logged in the past, which can lead to either understanding if a problem may have been previously encountered or if a workflow question has already been addressed and simply needs to be applied to a new environment. In both circumstances, the end result is quicker answers and faster resolutions.

Client Touchpoints

Esri’s Premium Support commitment is a once-per-month touchpoint between the client and the Technical Account Manager, although many Esri Canada TAMs meet with our clients more frequently as needed. The purpose of the client touchpoints is to go over open cases, make sure that client and TAM are properly aligned on priorities, discuss upcoming patches, releases and deprecations and to get a sense of what other initiatives the client has in the pipeline that may translate into technical support cases later on.

Technical and Procedural Expertise

Although a TAM doesn’t directly own cases in most instances, the nature of the TAM role is that being a TAM is an additional responsibility taken on by senior technical resources that have been working in Technical Support for several years.

Every TAM for this reason has at least one product area in which they’re an acknowledged expert and in most cases have secondary expertise in other areas. Since it’s difficult to rise to a level of seniority in Technical Support without also being able to quickly learn new technical concepts, TAMs can efficiently ramp on up other products, at least to the level where they can participate in the process of moving a case forward.

In many cases, this also involves liaising with our colleagues at Esri Inc. Just as clients have a Technical Account Manager with Esri Canada, Esri Canada has a Technical Account Manager within Esri Inc. That individual often helps us find resources to move cases forward and they typically will attend some of our client touchpoints as well to provide insider information about what products, releases and major announcements may be coming in the near future. 

Building a Career in Support

At the same time as clients’ needs are expanding, Esri Canada is always looking for ways to keep experienced technical resources within Technical Support. As experienced consultants working within a support framework, while we don’t have direct access to the Esri code base, we do have thousands of hours of troubleshooting experience that we bring to the table on every issue. This adds value to timely resolution of problems. It also helps with proper management of the more complex problems that can take months or even years to resolve.

The recent introduction of roles like Technical Lead and Technical Account Manager allows those who are interested in staying in support to continue their career progression by taking on additional challenges and responsibilities to go along with the technical expertise they’ve already built.

Being a TAM is not only valuable for our clients, it’s valuable for us. I now get a chance to interact with business units and internal colleagues I would rarely have connected with previously, and as time goes on, I’m augmenting my technical skills with a better understanding of the bigger picture of what clients are looking to implement to help them meet their goals.

In a recent case, my understanding of a client’s future plans, specifically that potential workarounds to the problem would only need to function for a few months, allowed us to think outside the box and come up with a solution I likely never would have thought of earlier in my career. Combining that with the opportunity to ramp up on disparate technologies I never would have worked with as an analyst or even as a senior consultant, being a TAM is unlocking professional development opportunities I never would have found otherwise.

The Neck to Grab

Being a TAM requires becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable, because that’s part of the gig. You’re always learning, always looking at ways to help and juggling those responsibilities with the regular day-to-day of working in Technical Support. My colleague in the US refers to this as being “the neck to grab”. If a client I serve as TAM for is unsure of where to send a question, I ask them to send it to me and then I figure out where it needs to land.

Sometimes that means a technical support case and sometimes it means a Professional Services engagement. Frequently, it’s just an informal exchange over e-mail between the client and I that never gets filed anywhere. That’s the relationship we’re shooting for; the one where clients feel comfortable directing questions to us as trusted partners in their success.

Whether you’re a client looking at whether Premium Support is the right fit or someone wondering if being a TAM is something you’d like to do, hopefully this has given you a better idea of the program and the role respectively, to help you answer those questions.