An Assigned Support Engineer (ASE) is a senior level support engineer who leads
our support delivery for one to four accounts. The ASE strives to:
- Develop excellent relationships with their main contacts at each account
- Understand each account's GitLab environment, architecture and use cases
- Be a trusted advisor to each account in order to guide them through tickets,
upgrades and other situations efficiently and smoothly
- Be available to work with their customers through tickets, issues and video
calls during business hours
- Be aware of all tickets submitted by each of their accounts, and lead as many
of those as they can within the amount of time allotted in the contracts
By taking a personalized, customized approach to serving each account, the ASE
has the opportunity to ensure that these important customers are happy and
successful with GitLab.
An Assigned Support Engineer (ASE) is a named senior-level support engineer assigned to a customer organization. ASEs provide customized, proactive technical support by learning the customer's GitLab environment in depth and building direct technical relationships with key contacts.
For the official description of this offering, see the
[Assigned Support Engineer Delivery Data Sheet](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I-GDQV9wZkTvTTMqIPw1mSLaeVUru4zU/view).
GitLab team members can view the current list of Assigned Support Engineers in the [Assigned Support Engineers](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/assigned-support-engineers/) project.
### ASE Leadership Team
## How customers get ASE service
Lissa Roberts, Senior Manager, Support Engineering in AMER holds overall responsibility for this part of GitLab Support, which includes things like working with Sales as necessary to bring in new ASE contracts and driving the definitions of what the service is and how we deliver it. All AMER ASEs also report directly to her. Her charter includes:
**Signature Success Plan:** Includes one ASE per account, combined with strategic Customer Success Management.
1. Enabling and encouraging teamwork among all of the ASEs globally
2. Guiding the team in identifying, developing and documenting best practices
3. Defining and documenting standard processes and reports for the program
There are two ways for a customer to purchase the ASE service:
Ilia Kosenko, Support Engineering Manager in EMEA, manages the EMEA ASEs.
-**Signature Success Plan:** Includes one ASE per account, combined with strategic Customer Success Management.
-**Standalone Add-On:** Available for Premium or Ultimate subscriptions. Customers can purchase multiple ASEs based on organizational needs.
Wei-Meng Lee, Support Engineering Manager in APAC, manages the APAC ASEs.
## Service Details
## The Assigned Support Engineer guide
- Each ASE works with up to 5 accounts.
- 8 hours of ASE time per week per account
- Flexible communication channels based on customer preference
- Emergency support outside business hours is handled by the global support 24/7 on-call rotation. The ASE follows up during their normal business hours.
The guide to all things ASE, whether you are an ASE, want to know about possibly
being an ASE or need to know how to work with ASEs. It's all here.
## What an ASE does
### ASE Communications
**Customized Support Planning:** Create quarterly ASE Support Plans aligned with customer priorities, business cycles, and communication preferences.
#### Slack
The ASE role has several distinguishing characteristics:
- ASE Program Slack channel: [#support_assigned-support-eng](https://gitlab.enterprise.slack.com/archives/C06E61D9Z7E)
- ASE accounts' Slack channels: many of the accounts make use of an external
Slack channel, one per account, for informal communications with Sales,
Customer Success, Professional Services and their ASE
-**Customized support planning:** Create quarterly ASE Support Plans aligned with customer priorities, business cycles, and communication preferences.
-**Proactive problem management:** Monitor ticket trends, identify root causes of recurring issues, document known errors with workarounds, and coordinate permanent fixes with Product and Engineering teams.
-**Upgrade and migration support:** Partner with customers and Professional Services through planning, execution, and post-project retrospectives.
-**Customer advocacy:** Represent customer technical needs to Product and Engineering teams with business context.
-**Environment documentation:** Create customer-specific runbooks for Global Support and ASE backup coverage.
#### Meetings
## ASE vs. Global Support
There are two recurring meetings in place to bring the ASEs and management
together for the purposes of supporting each other, sharing ASE practices, and
discussing needed process and program improvements. The meetings occur on
alternating weeks, one week being scheduled favorably for EMEA and AMER, and
the next for AMER and APAC. Both meetings can be found in the
[GitLab Support calendar](/handbook/support/#google-calendar).
| Aspect | Global Support | ASE Service |
|---|---|---|
| Engineer | Any available from queue | Assigned named engineer |
| Environment Knowledge | Learns from ticket and ASE documentation | Deep ongoing expertise, shared with Global Support |
| Communication | Ticket-based | Flexible channels |
| Approach | Reactive | Proactive problem management |
| Planning | Planning requests sent to ASE | Quarterly support plans, shared with Global Support |
-`ASE Sync - AMER/EMEA`: Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m. UTC
-`ASE Sync - APAC/AMER`: Thursdays at 1:00 a.m. UTC
Global Support works ASE account tickets using org notes for context. ASEs build and maintain customer documentation for use by Global Support, review the overall support engagement, conduct ticket trend analysis, and ensure all tickets are working towards resolution. ASEs select tickets to engage on based on customer prioritization, needs, and ticket trends. Global Support will engage with the ASE during business hours for clarification or escalation as needed.
To keep the meetings short and productive, much of the agenda is async. ASEs
and managers have agenda topics to update before each meeting.
## Service boundaries
#### GitLab Project
The ASE role is similar to, but distinct from, other account team roles:
See the [Assigned Support Engineers project](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/assigned-support-engineers)
for issues and a wiki that are used by the ASE community. There is a lot of
organizational and logistical information there, as well as issues describing
out-of-office coverage plans and containing discussions about ASE processes.
-**Assigned Support Engineer:** Proactive problem management, Known Factor Reviews, upgrade and migration support, customer advocacy, quarterly planning, and environment documentation.
-**Customer Success Manager (CSM) or Architect (CSA):** Strategic planning, executive relationships, adoption roadmaps, and commercial discussions.
### Working with ASEs
For Signature Success customers, the CSM/CSA and ASE coordinate through quarterly planning sessions. The CSM/CSA drives strategic value while the ASE ensures technical success.
ASEs tend to work with GitLab Team Members from all around Support and all
around the company in order to meet the needs of their accounts. We want
each collaboration to be positive, mutually-beneficial and successful. So
we've created the following sections to provide information to you, our
