From the everyday life of a service manager

From the typical day of a service manager in application support for Veeva CRM

April 14, 2025

Hello, I am Ralph Michel and as Service Manager at Sycor I am responsible for the application support of Veeva CRM and the connected systems at a globally operating pharmaceutical customer. With a team of certified administrators, it is our job to ensure the smooth operation of the solution for all users. I would like to give you an insight into a typical day:

Monday morning 07:00 - after a restful weekend, I start the computer and see what's new: The first thing I do is check my e-mail inbox. No disasters at first glance. But wait: I find a request to test the new process for sending samples. However, this new process does not yet seem to have been agreed with the Compliance department. I inform Compliance and ask them to set a date for coordination, to which the client should also be invited.

I then track open tasks and check whether there is already any feedback. Unfortunately, I have not yet received feedback from the legal department regarding an anomaly in the consent process. I have recommended a workaround to solve the problem and sent a reminder so that I can initiate further to-dos with the stakeholders and data teams involved in a timely manner after receiving feedback from the legal department.

The daily meeting with the system owners on the customer side takes place at 10:00 am. The main topic today is a planned major restructuring of the sales force. We agree on the timeline and I ask for more detailed information: Which field service line should be provided with which products, presentations, Veeva Approved emails etc.? Which sharing settings need to be adjusted accordingly? Another important topic I present is the performance report for the previous month: KPIs for budget and times, the status of current tasks and the quality of the support provided by the team.

This is followed by the internal weekly meeting with my support team. I inform the team members about the upcoming restructuring on the customer side and we distribute the most important tasks. During the course of the weekly meeting, we go through our list of open topics from the last meetings and can mark some of them as completed. Of course, some new topics are also added. In the last part of the Weekly, we discuss the deployment and vacation planning for the next few weeks so that we always have enough staff to work on the project during service times.

After the lunch break, I turn my attention to a problem that we have to solve with the customer's global service partner: Due to changes in the master database, merge errors have occurred in customer data. There have already been various deep dives with our data provider, the global database team and stakeholders on the customer side. The affected accounts have been identified and reported to the global team.

In addition to the affected customer accounts, I am also analyzing other affected linked data records such as documented visits, sample submission documentation, consent including email addresses and multichannel activities. Through targeted data exports and queries, all affected data records could be clearly selected so that we are ready to go. As soon as the global team has finished correcting the master data, it will be my team's job to clean up the linked data records again. To do this, we will create and validate load files and load them at the right time.

In the hope that I can implement this tomorrow, I'm going to take a well-deserved break.

Conclusion:

As a service manager, I am the link between the customer, the other service partners and my support team. On the one hand, you have to create solutions quickly and pragmatically, while on the other hand you have to keep an eye on the service processes, authorizations and dependencies. Ultimately, my goal is to ensure that both the customer and my team are satisfied at the same time.

My most important tool for this is communication - direct and open.