Leaving a Fortune 100 company to work from home with Support.com
In our “Meet the Support.com Agents” series, we sit down with Support.com Agents to hear their stories and experiences and to learn how they came to join the Support.com team. In each blog, we’ll get to know a different agent and will learn more about why they love working with Support.com.
With over three decades of experience in the IT world—and a decent chunk of that time spent in the throes of a Fortune 100 company—Bryan Brown certainly has the techie know-how to guide Support.com customers through any snag in their connected devices. And with a passion for deconstructing and re-building the latest gadgets, Bryan is a top-of-his-game agent who’s found fulfillment and peace in a remote work position at Support.com.
But Bryan’s journey to Support.com was largely an accident, he says. A long-term engineer based in Michigan, Bryan found himself frequenting the unemployment ads from time to time, “just to see what was out there.” When his eyes fell upon Support.com and the work-from-home position that would eliminate his brutal commute, Bryan knew he was ready to make the transition.
“In my previous career, I had very long commutes. For decades, I would spend 3-5 hours a day driving, and you’re exposed to all kinds of dangers being on the road that much—not to mention the gas money and the mundaneness of sitting in the car in rush-hour traffic.”
With a previous career focus in electronic engineering that thrust him into the corporate world as Senior Network System Engineer with a regular routine of flying around the country to oversee systems integrations and to build and deploy servers/networks for new corporate locations, working at home was a refreshing change for Bryan. Most important? The extra time he has back in his day to spend with his family.
But it’s not just the lack of a commute that has improved Bryan’s day-to-day work life; he also enjoys the renewed productivity and the dynamic challenges he gets from his work with Support.com.
“It’s made me more productive, working from home,” says Bryan. “There are little to none of the interruptions you’d find in the everyday office environment. You’re laser-focused when working from home.”
It’s the fast-moving environment at Support.com that Bryan says is both his biggest challenge and his greatest pleasure, as he needs to mélange his technical expertise with malleable communication skills to make sure every customer hangs up the phone satisfied: “I’m talking to lots of unique people with different personalities—and everybody needs a problem solved. You have to have the hat of therapist or friend or the geek technical support guy—whatever’s needed. You have to be able to adapt and overcome.”
And when he looks back on his long tenure in the corporate IT business, Bryan is just waiting for the rest of the industry to catch up to the all-remote model that Support.com has long found success with: “It’s a much better model that I think most companies will be moving to in the future. This brick-and-mortar concept is going to become old; in fact, in my previous career, we were starting to experiment with working from home, and it was a success.”
Like many of our other agents, such as Devona Shuford and David Shetter, Bryan sees the value in Support.com’s remote-work model as an all-around advent for the customer support industry, giving employees a fulfilling career that offers flexibility and a satisfying work/life balance, while delivering unparalleled service and support to customers seeking help with their connected devices.