I am Hannah Monsuur and I am Technical Support Specialist at GenDx. Our Support team consists of 5 persons: Veerle van Meervelt PhD, Zhen Ping PhD, Elja Louer PhD, Yvonne Dorland PhD and myself, Hannah Monsuur PhD. At GenDx, we have a strong focus on excellent customer support and strive to answer every email within 24-hours. On a yearly basis, we assist customers from 55+ countries around the world with product questions, practical matters, data interpretation, and more. In this blog I would like to take you along in a day at GenDx Support.
At 9 am we start the day with our daily scrum, we have quite a lot of e-mails today! Since we are all working from home due to the pandemic, we are meeting each other online. In the scrum we go over each e-mail, if needed we shortly discuss the case and then we allocate the e-mail to one of our team members. We get all kind of questions, you can think of requests to renew a license, questions about Sanger, a new lab asking for help with the NGS workflow, challenging NGS data analysis questions, etc.
Yesterday we received a particular challenging case, the customer sent us NGS data which they could not interpret. It is potentially a novel allele, but it might also be a sequence artefact. Elja has been working on this question, but since it is so challenging we decide in the scrum that Veerle and Elja will further discuss the case together. Two people always know more than one!
” Two people always know more than one! “
At 10 am, Hannah has a meeting with a customer who will perform their very first NGS workflow. Together with Technical Application Specialist Robert Welleweerd B.ASc, she will guide them through the steps of amplification in an online meeting. Since the camera will be on the work bench the whole time, Robert and Hannah can follow their steps in detail and give advice while the workflow is performed. After lunch an e-mail in the inbox shows us a gel picture with very nice amplicons, the meeting has been a success! Tomorrow we continue the workflow with library preparation.
While Yvonne is writing an e-mail to advice a customer about the right settings to analyze MX11-3, the phone rings! It is a customer from Germany having difficulties while loading the sequencer. It is a difficult question so she quickly discusses the question with a colleague, continues the call with the customer and to the relieve of the customer the issue is resolved. Now back to the MX11-3 question as there are still multiple questions waiting to be answered.
Ping has been helping our distributor in China, they needed help with Sanger data which did not align to the reference. Luckily it was just a matter of giving the .abi files the correct name. Once he finishes the last question allocated to him during the scrum, he takes another look at the inbox and continues with a new question.
” There is never a ‘normal’ day at Support “
It is 5 pm and Elja has finished an elaborate e-mail to the customer explaining why the data was indeed a novel allele. There is also an e-mail from someone we helped last week, she thanks us for the great help with her data analysis question and informs us that we can use her case for one of our NGS case study webinars. Today we have answered many e-mails and tomorrow we will continue with new questions. There is never a ‘normal’ day at Support, it is always a surprise which questions we receive and whether urgent questions or meetings come up during the day.
