Tell us about your career.
I’m originally from Serbia. While I was in college studying Economics, a couple of friends started a software company and asked me to manage their computer network. I had no experience, so I got hands-on training. I liked the work, and five years later I moved to Boston to study Computer Network and Information Systems. During college, I interned with Cisco Customer Advocacy Lab Operations (CALO). After graduating, I joined the Conferencing TAC team that supports Cisco Unified MeetingPlace and WebEx Meetings Server solutions. That was six years ago, and today I’m a senior customer support engineer and team lead in US EAST Conferencing TAC.
When did you start participating in Cisco Support Community?
In 2013, I took part in an Ask the Expert session on MeetingPlace. At that time, the community didn’t have a Conferencing community. When my team saw the interest from customers and partners, we offered to create a Conferencing community. My team doesn’t have pre-deployment support to help customers prepare for conferencing solutions, so the forum is a good place for customers to ask about features, deployment, upgrades, configuration, migration paths, and much more. By getting involved in the community, answers we provided are now part of the global knowledge base that comes up during Google searches and is available to everyone.
How do you participate?
I monitor the forums and answer questions daily. I’ve also posted a couple of documents. One explains how to obtain Cisco WebEx Meetings Server software media, and the other contains notes about interoperating with third-party products. Most of the time, we work on improving the official product documentation instead of posting documents to public ourselves, so I am not focused on that part as much. Answering questions in the forum doesn’t take very much of my time and even if it did, I would find time for it. My job description includes making an impact outside of regular TAC cases, so one of my goals is to constantly improve my activity in the community and try to expand my area of influence.
Any thoughts to encourage your fellow TAC engineers to participate?
First, if a question lingers in the community for a couple of days without an answer, it will most likely become a TAC case that pulls engineers away from more complex and important cases. So I view the time I spend on the forums as a way to proactively resolve issues.
Second, customers really appreciate Cisco Support Community because they can get support without having to pay extra for it and deal with opening a TAC ticket. In that way, the community is a bonus of purchasing Cisco solutions. I think the community helps our sales efforts and adds even more value to the customer.
Finally, just seeing the responses from grateful customers is motivating enough. All TAC engineers have a drive to help people. It’s what we do every day! Participating in the community is just one more way to help.
