IBM - Contact Center Professional of the Year

Company: IBM
Company Description: IBM is a technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 171 countries. IBM produces and sells computer hardware, middleware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from very high end computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Contact Center Professional of the Year

Nomination Title: Chris Wickremasinghe

Chris is an exceptional AIX support engineer withseveral decades of experience working with IBM AIX and other flavors of Unix operating systems. Within the IBM support organization, Chris is known for his in-depth domain knowledge (AIX/Unix, Virtualization, I/O, LVM), end-to-end problem determination capability, client advocacy, and willingness to share. These are evident through all the stellar feedback from IBM’s global clients, colleagues and leadership teams.

As a senior technical leader, he isactively engagedin all key business initiatives, andprovides valuable insights and recommendations to the global team. Heleads by example. He is one of the role models in the global support organization, with a potential to make greater impacts in a broader scope.

Managers often commendChris for his efforts.At the end of 2021, one manager wrote to her peers,“I would like to make sure we recognize the continuous efforts and contribution of Chris W who was extremely helpful with multiple critical situations across many of the AIX components this year. His leadership and expertise are unique and deserve to be recognized.”

He is the go-to SMEnot only for his expertise but also for his willingness to share his knowledge with his peers. He is known to be very friendly and responsive to requests from colleagues.Whenever the other teams in different time zones need help to work on higher priority issues 24/7, he is very dependable to continue working seamlessly from where the earlier team has left off to provide continued support to the customer.

In recent years, Chris has conducted many training sessions for newcomers around the global support centers. He mentors teammates on a regular basis.Near the end of 2021, through the IBM Recognition program, colleagues poured in to show appreciation to Chris. Some examples:

You are the best colleague anyone can ask for.

Not only your "black hole" of knowledge impresses me, but also the way how you deal with the problems, how you help customers and the team, and how you get along with people.

You always go above and beyond and willing to share your knowledge to me/us. Thank you for always helping Premium Offshift Team.

Your prompt communication to customer about the progress, recreation & action plan made the customer to feel have a proper satisfied support.

Thank you for your immediate actions and top-notch expertise, which helped my client recover from a very difficult situation. Impressing a big customeris a hard thing to do!

Would like to convey manythanks for mentoring, educating, assisting me always.

Chris always puts the client first.He has always provided excellent customer support above and beyond the expectations. Last year he achieved a NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 88. He often received perfect 10 scores from the customers as part of IBM Client Feedback surveys.

There are several instances where Chris took the lead to become the focal point and driven them to resolution and saved the day for the customer.He often jumps and stays on hot situations between late US shift and late AP shift. For example, per our data in 2021, Chris took ownership of 130+ client cases when they were at Severity-1 (the most critical level). In total he worked on 454 Severity-1 cases, 13 CritSits.He ranks No.1 in the whole AIX support organization, for both the number of severity-1 cases worked and severity-1 hours logged.

In his own reflection,“Having spent some years on the ‘other side’ as a system administrator also helpsempathize with our clients and understand the pressures they are under as they look to us for assistance”.In many client situations, Chris would soon become the client team’s go-to person for follow-up Q&As, plans and directions.

Here is a recentexample of Chris' dependability and expertise:

One of our top clientshad a major impact due to bad media (EMC) and lost a very important DB Volume Group on AIX. This resulted in their billing/invoicing application going down. Customer was under a time crunch and had to resolve it that Saturday, otherwise they were going to face severe penalties due to missed invoicing, which the client stated was for around $1 Billion USD. This was a very unique problem and is normally considered to be beyond the scope of regular support. It requires very specific & deep skills in AIX LVM area. Customer did not have any recent backup, their last one was 10 days old. They had 35 TB data, from 10 days ago, which would take them around 35 hours to restore.An Executive Awareness Alertwas opened, and an email was sent to our General Manager due to the impact. Emergency Response

Managerreached out to Chris, even though he was not on callbecause of the deep skills he has in this area. Chris created very specific scripts after studying the corruption and was able to restore customer's VG/LVM mapping preventing loss of very valuable data. This effort required an all-weekend effort on Chris’s part. Needless to say, the customer was extremely pleased with IBM support and specifically with Chris's technical prowess.