Associate Application Support Specialist

About the Team

This is a team, responsible for second level user support in a global landscape.  The Associate Application Support Specialist is responsible for providing primary support to Swiss Re's Corporate Solutions business users, covering primarily North America as part of a team that supports a Global community.  This position is to provide great service to our internal customers, by monitoring and managing applications globally, to maximize availability, to alert internal customers to outages, escalating service affecting issues as appropriate and to restore service as quickly as possible through own efforts, or through appropriate referral.

You will have the opportunity to become a functional expert in the end-to-end process and system landscape of a commercial insurance company building a strong base of knowledge.  The application landscape is dynamic and the support this team will provide will evolve over time.

Team members are also taking on project / task work supporting an agile mindset.  Going into the new year, we hope to have some team members supporting more on project / task work. The vision for the team continues to evolve where we will look to be involved in Service Health Checks with Real-Time Monitoring using dashboards, KPI'ls and smart analytics.

You will work collaboratively in a globally distributed team environment. The role will report to the Regional Lead responsible.

About the Role

• Provide support through Incident Management.  Incident Management includes identifying, analyzing and correcting the incident from reoccurring in the future.  Either technical or functional issues cause incidents.  Incidents disrupt the business, and your goal is to restore normal service operations as quickly as possible.  You will be the users advocate so you will need to listen, understand their incident and see it to resolution.   Through your learnings, you will become an expert of the functional applications as well as the business processes used.

• Prepare to take support over from the Development Teams.  For each application on boarded, there is a significant amount of time planned for knowledge transfer from the current support teams.  You will need to listen, understand and document what you learn.  You will need to apply these learnings throughout the job. 

• Monitor the health of the applications. If there is a degradation in performance, you will need to take the steps to rectify it.  This includes coordination with other parties such as the Major Incident Management team and Application Development Team.  You may need to restart servers or flush messaging queues.  This will require experience with technical issue troubleshooting and a solid understanding of the end-to-end application and infrastructure landscape.  Requires the ability to interact intelligently with technical teams (i.e. application development, network, database, cloud operations etc.) and guide them to issue resolution.  In cases of application outages, you will need to manage unplanned user communications.

• Problem Management Oversight.  This includes analysis and coordination with other teams until the problem is fully resolved.  A problem could be a cluster of similar incidents given to the dedicated application team to resolve.  Users could have been given a workaround, but you will be the advocate for the customer to make sure their incident is fully resolved even after a work around is provided.

• Interact with users and members from other teams.  During Incident & Problem Management, the users will depend on you to see their incidents are resolved.  This could depend on you reaching out to other teams or users to obtain the information to "fix" the problem.  You will need to communicate with them via email, instant messaging and phone calls.  Doing this successfully will build your network of resources. 

• Propose Application Improvement Candidates.  You will look for opportunities and propose application changes with a goal to reduce the volume of tickets raised by users and increase the customer experience within the applications.

• Periodically on the weekend or possibly evenings, you will need to participate in Smoke Testing the applications after infrastructure maintenance activities have occurred.  This activity is extremely important to make sure the user community can effectively work without incidents.

About You

• Ability to speak and write English fluently.
• Obtained a four-year college degree or equivalent is highly preferred.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Customer and people relationship skills
• Knowledge of Commercial Insurance is a plus
• Agile a continuous learning mindset
• Business acumen and mindset – Foundational understanding of business and how IT supports the delivery of business goals.  Seeks to understand the end-to-end process, needs of business teams, and utilizes that knowledge to advocate for them through the issue resolution process. 
• Highly motivated individual who can think analytically.
• Ability to complete work independently or in cooperation with others.
• Organized and able to work effectively under tight deadlines.
• Technical aptitude and mindset - Understands fundamentals of software development (i.e., programming, database, network, etc.) though no programming will be required in the role.  Must be willing to learn specific technical skills (i.e., server restarts, clearing queues) that will allow for resolution of major issues.  Ability to identify root cause of issues in a cloud-based environment is a plus.
• Ability and willingness to transfer knowledge and experience to colleagues.
• Actively aid others, seeks opportunities to “pitch in” and help colleagues.
• Demonstrates willingness and initiative to seek new knowledge and tasks, question current processes, and suggest improvements.

IMPORTANT: Please submit your CV in English because this position will report to US

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.