Summary: Inside Acquia, the Client Advisory Team is something special. These are the people who are on the front lines, helping others succeed with Drupal 24 hours a day. They go above and beyond the call of duty for anyone who needs help and for other members of their team. In July, I spoke with five Acquia Client Advisors about their work and their team. THIS IS SUPPORTA! What a team! This is a group of technology experts who will fight (maybe literally?) for you and your Drupal site. They will celebrate your launch, your solved problems, and your successes possibly just as hard as you. While editing the recordings I made for this podcast, I could feel a contagious excitement steeping into me. I think this is because what you hear is the sound of Drupalists talking about something they (and so many of us in the Drupal community) love to do and truly believe in: helping other people with Drupal. The fact that they get to do this for a living must be an incredible feeling. Life in the Trenches I spoke with these Client Advisors about what support means at Acquia, about the team, and what makes them tick. Aurelien Navarre - EMEA Support Team Lead On support delivery - Aurelien describes Acquia support thus: "... Making sure that support delivery will be top-notch. Your job is to make sure that you will convey the correct technical expertise that [customers expect] and that you will give them the path to move forward ... making sure they can follow Drupal best-practices or making sure they can understand the Acquia tools and get the most out of them." If you speak French, check out Aurelien's screencasts on mastering Drupal at www.drupalfacile.org. Chris O'Neil - Client Advisor On helping customers to success - I find how Chris describes this quite moving, "I think my greatest moment so far has probably been receiving feedback from people in whose voice I can hear desperation relieved ... where it's obvious that something that has been plaguing them for days, or weeks, or even months has suddenly lifted from their shoulders and that I have been a part of discovering that ... part of helping them work through that and overcome that ... and for Acquia to be a part of that." Alex Jarvis - TAM Support Manager On what support at Acquia is - From his perspective, Alex calls the Client Advisory Team: "The first-line channel between different companies – from companies that have used Drupal for a long time, to companies that are brand-new to Drupal, and maybe even brand-new to content management systems. We are that voice for them that knows what the challenges are, how to advise them, how to support them, best practices ... We're helping mould the direction they go in and the approaches they adopt to make Drupal as awesome as it can be for their sites and their properties." Tine Sørensen - Technical Account Manager On what's great and different about working in support - Tine moved from being a backend developer to the Acquia Client Advisory Team. I love her perspective on what makes supporting other people's Drupal sites so great: "Here, you get to use all this awesome stuff you've learned over the years and apply it to solving other people's problems, as opposed to sitting there with your own code. That can be kind of awesome because you actually solve stuff for people on a daily basis. It's awesome to go home with a success; it always is." Sam Lerner - Technical Account Manager Sam sums it all up - Well known among his Supporta colleagues as being deeply passionate about support Sam puts it simply: "Support is helping people work with Drupal to succeed at what they're doing. Support gives people a way to get answers faster, so they can get back to doing their development and spend less time struggling. Acquia's goal is to make people in all realms successful with Drupal." Highlight When asked to...
