Meet Ean Underdown, Service Desk Engineer. He joined the team in August and has 8 years in the industry, so our customers are in safe hands.
Ean shares all about his role of helping customers, and also gives an insight into what a service desk engineer does in their downtime. Spoiler – it’s more techy stuff.
1. Tell us about your role
As a Service Desk Engineer, I am the first line of support, so I spend a lot of time in contact with many of our customers. You never know what’s going to come in through the door and we deal with everything – from ‘I’ve forgotten my password’ to the more complex issues of viruses and losing documents.
2. What does a typical day look like?
I usually get into the office quite early. My wife is a teacher and I drop her off on the way. The first thing I do is get a cup of tea or coffee and check the helpdesk for anything that has happened overnight that needs attention to make sure we can get customers up and running before the day starts.
After that I can pick up on anything still open from the previous day. There will usually be phone calls and emails with customers. I’ll make sure to fit in a round of tea and take a break to stretch my legs at lunchtime.
Then the afternoon is a rinse and repeat of managing anything that comes into the helpdesk.
3. Tell us something you do that customers might not be aware of.
When customers experience error messages, we have to go through troubleshooting steps in the background to start excluding issues until we find the right solution. If customers see an error message, it really helps to get a screenshot straight away as well as much detail as possible, such as if it is affecting other users or the steps taken to get the error message. This way we can usually resolve the issue much quicker.
As well as reacting to customer queries, a lot of proactive work goes on in the background. I check back-ups are working and check monitoring alerts, such as for out-of-date antivirus software. All these things help make everyone’s life a little easier.
4. What’s the best and worst things about your job?
Every day is a school day, and we are always learning something new. We don’t see the same error messages all the time and often systems do things we may not have seen before. We have to research and identify issues and we learn and remember for next time.
We are custodians of our customers’ IT systems and they trust us to maintain them. I love that I enable people to do their job. If a server is down, that affects the business and there is satisfaction when customers are happy and we have managed to solve their problem.
Of course, there are days that are more stressful than others, but that comes with every job and it’s all part of what we do.
5. How are you settling into your new team?
The Wessex IT team is absolutely awesome. I haven’t felt like a newbie at all and I’ve slotted right into the team. It’s the small things, like I was offered a cup of tea and immediately made part of the tea round!
6. What do you like to do outside work?
I like to spend as much time as I can with my family. I have a one-year-old boy and watching him experience the world for the first time is breathtaking.
When he’s not taking up all my time, I love to game and build computers. I’m not sick of IT by the end of the day and I can genuinely hand on heart say I got to turn my passion into a career. So I don’t just switch off being a service desk engineer when leaving the office – I continue to take computers apart and put them back together again! My wife is also a gamer, and we play PC games together as well as cooperative board games when we can.
