Role Overview
The Product Specialist is responsible for supporting customer escalations from regional service teams and acting as the escalation focal point for customer and internal service escalations into Product Development and Product Management. Through their domain knowledge and technical product knowledge evaluates and tests customer problems and either provides solutions or escalates through the Problem Report process to Product Development. The Product Specialist works closely with Product Support Management to identify problem trends, perform root cause analysis, and provides input for prioritizing fixes for future releases. In addition, the Product Specialist collaborates and provides user domain knowledge in support of Product Management, Product Marketing, Sales, and Product Development, including R&D and QA. The Product Specialist participates in the product service commercialization process, including helping prepare the regional service organizations to support upcoming product releases.
Responsibilities and Expectations:
• Able up to travel with short notice (up to 10% of time on average)
• Acts as primary point of contact for beta sites and conduct beta for specific releases
• Collaborate with PD team on troubleshooting and solving technical problems
• Completes expense, time tracking, and customer call logging reports using systems and processes identified by Kodak
• Develops and maintains advanced technical expertise with Kodak products, systems and/or solutions
• Develops, reviews, and updates technical training material for ease of understanding and completeness
• Documents problem resolutions for regional escalation case closure, ongoing support and learning
• In partnership with Product Management uses domain expertise to assist in translating customer feature requests into stories and/or modifications to existing features for input to Product Management
• In partnership with Product Support Management, uses domain expertise to identify problems, problem trends, and product performance data to prioritize bugs for Product Development
• Leads or participates in periodic technical "Checkpoint" meetings with regional teams
• Participates on special projects and company initiatives as needed
• Provides Product Development with precise problem descriptions, test cases, customer files and potential root causes and adheres to established SLA's between escalation functions
• Provides remote assistance to regional service teams as required
• Provides technical mentorship to the regional service teams and issues relevant technical bulletins and support alerts
• Report technical escalation troubleshooting results and findings to Product Development using the Problem Report process
• Responds to regional sales organization technical questions that have been escalated through regional resources
• Review new feature use cases and performs new feature release testing as required to gain in-dept knowledge of feature functionality and provides feedback to Product Development
• Supports regional technical services teams for customer escalations and as necessary works directly with customers for problem resolution
Education and Work Experience:
• Undergraduate degree in engineering, graphic arts, or a technical curriculum is preferred
• Work experience in graphic arts is recommended
Experience:
• At least 5 years graphic arts or printing industry experience in a customer service environment is required
• Minimum 3 years of product support experience
Personal Attributes:
• A history of personal and professional credibility with peers, leadership and customers
• Ability to adapt to a fast-changing environment and work well under pressure
• Ability to work within a collaborative team environment
• Able to convey customer and Kodak business value related to escalations and feature requests
• Able to handle an unpredictable workload (including the willingness and ability to occasionally provide support outside of normal working hours, when required)
• Able to work cooperatively and collaboratively within a team environment
• Able to simplify complex support issues for various audiences
• Excellent interpersonal skills, including teamwork, respect, courtesy, tact and discretion
• Strong mentorship skills
• Excellent written & verbal communication and technical documentation skills
• Exceptional ability to make decisions that result in customer satisfaction
• Have an instinct for technologies and techniques, and enjoy trying things out
• Proven organizational skills
• Self-motivated and action oriented
• Stamina to see a difficult problem to its conclusion
• Strong problem-solving skills
• Strong technical background
• Superior interdisciplinary communication and listening skills
• Understanding of the printing industry and its processes
• Willing and able to travel (up to 10% of the time on average)
• Willing to continually learn, through interacting with the team, formal courses or self-directed programs
Estimated Salary: $80,000 - $87,000
Experience Level: 0-5 Years
Requisition ID: 2270
