Nowhere is that more relevant than with our Service Delivery Managers (SDMs), who work tirelessly each day to keep things ticking over and running smoothly for our customers.
To highlight this a bit more, we spoke to Rafet Celebi, one of our dedicated SDMs who took us through a day in his life…
Like many of us, Rafet starts each day by checking his phone’s email notifications. That’s paired with a morning coffee, providing a moment of solace before the action gets underway. Once he’s logged in, he works through emails, following up on any urgent or high-priority updates required.
To get things in order, he writes down a to-do list for the day by hand, ordering tasks by priority. Next, it’s time for a quick breakfast and a scroll through LinkedIn.
To stay in the loop, Rafet spends time at the start of each shift catching up with team members and SDM counterparts – both partner and customer side.
That’s all wrapped up with a morning walk with the family dog, Marley, before kicking off the all-important to-do list.
Rafet explains how the SDM role is far from one-size-fits-all. It’s continually changing, depending on business goals and company direction, both internally and externally. As a result, his to-do list is never the same on two given days.
First and foremost, he’s responsible for keeping customers happy with Aura’s services (including sub-contractors). That includes managing our consolidated partner skills matrix and, more recently, ensuring all partners have been able to continue supporting Aura customers through COVID-19.
Rafet also takes care of any Complex Service Requests (CSRs) – from project tracking to reporting, as well as assisting with commercials.
Naturally, Aura’s performance and the satisfaction of our customers is at the heart of Rafet’s role. That’s why he liaises with counterparts on a daily basis, ensuring that all outcomes are valued by the customer. He also takes part in weekly Service Improvement Plan meetings – or SIP for short.
Crucially, Rafet is responsible for ensuring Service Level Targets are consistently met and reported on through service level reports and review meetings. A great example of this is with our largest service integrator customer and its end user. Rafet produces a monthly executive report, covering all topics in one place, including:
It provides a clear, simplified view for the customer, which always garners positive feedback from the customer as well as Aura board members.
One of the most critical aspects of Rafet’s role as an SDM is that he’s always available for our customers across the world. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean he has to stay awake around the clock. Rafet works alongside our dedicated Asia-Pacific SDM, Ryan Steer, to provide a 24/7 point of contact.
Rafet and Ryan have full flexibility in their working hours, allowing them to be on call for a global customer base including Brazil, Switzerland, India and Japan.
As well as seeing to high-priority escalations, they stay in regular contact with one another and the customers they take care of. Within that, they have to work within unique and sometimes complex communication chains in line with our customers and partners.
While flexible working caters for most customers’ needs, there are always times when Rafet is needed for out-of-hours or weekend work. Whether it’s dealing with escalations or updating end users directly, this is something he takes in his stride, time and again – which is highly appreciated by our customers. Here are two examples where Rafet has gone above and beyond.
Following a planned sanity check on a Saturday evening, an issue was reported with 43 unregistered phones early on Sunday morning. It later transpired that the customers’ internal team had performed an access switch replacement during the check. With the customer unable to reach their assigned engineer, Rafet escalated the case to the 24/7 desk, his SDM counterpart and senior management.
An SDM responded, reached out to the engineer in Japan and confirmed a second sanity check was underway. All work was completed successfully, no further issues were reported, and the customer and Aura’s COO were kept updated throughout. The weekend escalation issues were added to the SIP and highlighted in the next management meeting.
Another issue came with a customer’s Avaya telephony system, which had stopped working at their Mexico branch. It was an intermittent issue with an unknown root cause. After several hours of investigation from all sides, as well as cable replacement, a faulty gateway was suspected to be the problem.
Rafet ensured that the local partner was contacted to organise an on-site engineer, who could perform a gateway replacement. They confirmed the engineer would be attending within an hour. The customer was updated, with contact details provided to arrange access for the engineer.
The gateway was successfully replaced and tested, meeting the SLA and keeping the customer happy. Crucially, everyone involved was kept fully updated with the process, resulting in positive feedback for the swift resolution.
SDMs like Rafet are critical to our Global Managed Services. While much of their work might go unnoticed, our team and our customers are all hugely appreciative of the amazing job they do.
If you would like to find out more about our services and how our SDMs can help take the hassle our of your IT and communications, don’t hesitate to arrange a call with one of our team.
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