IT Support Specialist: manage a 10-hour downtime with customers

Simulation details

This Job Simulation is designed for people interested in **IT support roles** that want to learn the skills to perform in technical customer support roles or want to refresh their skills and assess their ability to manage real customer support scenarios.

Managing customers, technical details and internal team coordination are all critical skills you will encounter in this simulation.

**Your mission in this simulation**
Your goal is to manage a critical downtime in a large software company that is blocking customers for more than 10+ hours. They cannot get access to their files, projects and data. Your customers are not technical, they are end-users from large companies.

As an IT Support Specialist your are on the frontline, managing customers but also coordinating with your team to understand what’s happening and how to communicate it. There are several things that are far from optimal and a 10-hour downtime is causing a lot of issues for your customers.

**How to complete the simulation**
To complete the simulation – after talking and managing customers and internal teams – you will need to prepare a DOC or PDF document and send it to your manager, with the following answers:

1. Write a post-mortem of what happened and how you managed the communication and customer support. Detail your choices and strategy. Explain how customers reacted to it.

2. List and explain what needs to change in terms of processes and approach to manage a future downtime of similar size.

**Read more about BuildGlass Inc., the company you work for**
BuildGlass Inc. is a dominant force in the global augmented reality (AR) platform industry, with a presence in every major market worldwide. Over 3,000 construction and architectural firms depend on BuildGlass, making it a transformative tool in how professionals visualize, design, and manage construction projects. From North America to Asia and Europe to Africa, BuildGlass’s influence is vast. Customers use BuildGlass to store, design and create all their construction projects: the tool has several project management features but it also stores all the pictures, documents and general files related to every building or project the customer needs to manage. BuildGlass has also a complex permission system that allows construction companies to share data and documents with all their external contractors.

Buildglass is the go-to digital platform solution in the construction industry but the company has been underinvesting in their infrastructure for more than 3 years while customers grew 5x. They are currently experiencing one of the worst downtimes in their history, they have been down for 10 hours blocking almost 40% of their customers globally, and some of the most critical ones unfortunately.

The company runs on Microsoft Azure and uses Okta as their main vendor for access management. It’s not clear if there is something wrong on their servers or also on Okta.

As an IT Support Specialist you are now managing the communication with these customers and you need to coordinate it in accordance with the internal team, trying to provide a good enough estimation and offering help in the meantime. Your customers have access to a live chat with you but some of them have also decided to escalate things talking to their account managers.

Team

Who you will work with in this Simulation
Your team is 100% generated by AI – you will not interact with real people and no human will read your conversation.

Brad Mitchell
SVP Global Customer Support

Linda Carter
Head of IT Infrastructure at BuildGlass

Carl Jackson
IT Support Specialist at Buildglass Inc.

Lorena Bellefort
Head of Projects and Delivery at Skyline Constructions

Michael Bramos
Senior Project Manager Community Buildings, City of Las Vegas

Hunter Kreky
DevOps Engineer at BuildGlass

Bryan Rutan
CFO at Bellcorp Inc.

Organization

BuildGlass Inc. is a dominant force in the global augmented reality (AR) platform industry, with a presence in every major market worldwide. Over 3,000 construction and architectural firms depend on BuildGlass, making it a transformative tool in how professionals visualize, design, and manage construction projects. From North America to Asia and Europe to Africa, BuildGlass’s influence is vast. Customers use BuildGlass to store, design and create all their construction projects: the tool has several project management features but it also stores all the pictures, documents and general files related to every building or project the customer needs to manage. BuildGlass has also a complex permission system that allows construction companies to share data and documents with all their external contractors.