Ben Gonzales, CSPO

Experience

• 

  Apple

  Jan 2007 - Jan 2012

  Led a team of Geniuses, Creatives and Family Room Specialists. Drove company initiatives with innovative ideas that benefited all teams creating massive productivity, exceeding company metric goals. Responsible for training and mentoring Geniuses and Family Room Specialist in all technical and customer aspects needed for the Genius Bar. Performed employee one on one coaching conversations pertaining to metrics and goals required for overall success. Created employee schedules with analytical strategy, forecasting demand to create a capacity plan suitable for the store and the employee. Led weekly, monthly, and quarterly team meetings discussing strategy, policy, metrics, goals and open forum discussions. Created reports on up to date metrics for the team for consistent awareness of performance. Show less Supervisor for the personal training team. Responsible for training customers in an individual and group environment, facilitating high attendance workshops on certain software topics, educating every trainer on new application releases, facilitating team meetings discussing metrics, and strategy. Created leader led training curriculums allowing employees to learn applications required to perform the role. Created employee schedules with analytical strategy, forecasting demand to create a capacity plan suitable for the store and the employee. The last level of software troubleshooting support for the Genius Bar prior to escalating to engineering. Show less

  • Lead Genius- Hardware Repair & CX Experience Supervisor

    Jan 2010 - Jan 2012

  • Lead Creative- Software Training Program Supervisor

    Jan 2008 - Jan 2010

  • Creative- Certified Apple Trainer

    Jan 2007 - Jan 2008
• 

  Physicians'​ Choice, LLC

  Jun 2007 - Nov 2008

  IT System Administrator

  Responsible for the entire company's hardware, software, and peripherals. Provided in house hardware repair for fleet stock of Dell, HP and Apple computers. Set up local static IP's and maintained security within firewall network.

• 

  Apple

  Jan 2013 - now

  Within AppleCare Operations, Passionately managing a team of business analysts (BA’s) providing sustaining support for call center systems including Advisor applications, reporting systems and LMS environments.• Drives direct reports' workflow within an ITIL environment in a tiered support model, managing Tier 2 and Tier 3 analysts.• Manages teams collaborative resolutions of tool outages escalated by the business with priority and urgency, to prevent bad user experience. • Oversees escalations sent to global IT and Dev teams, driving quick resolutions and code fix deployments in to production.• Key stakeholder in prioritizing production fixes for multiple systems.• Passionately drives results in SLA and other key performance metrics, presenting results to senior leadership within the company quarterly.• Mentors the mentality of root cause analysis and soft skill techniques regularly to improve overall user experience.• Current Product Owner for Apple's Worldwide ticket management systems used to analyze and respond to trouble tickets reported by the business.• Involved in UAT before production releases to establish successful hand offs.• Facilitates and presents post-mortem meetings after every major production release.• Facilitates the creation of content and procedures when needed. Show less • Project Manager within AppleCare’s Project Management Office. • Manages projects using Agile, Waterfall, and Sigma methodologies. • Responsible for presenting quarterly project updates to steering committee and senior leadership. • Consistently manages stakeholder requirements and expectations. • Conducts interviews along with focus groups to understand and perfect user requirements. • Facilitates frequent workshops and brainstorming sessions involving development, QA, stakeholders and business teams. • Facilitates daily SCRUM meetings. • Initiates engagements between AppleCare and third party providers for procurement purposes. • Creates plan scope management and WBS for core team. • Responsible for completing project schedule including sprint iterations, milestones and overall product release. • Writes project documentation which includes but is not limited to; project charter, user stories, product backlog, sprint backlog, burn down charts, requirements documentation and the project management plan. • Manages the change control board before and after production release. • Creates risk and stakeholder registers. • Heavy use of alternatives generation techniques. • Practices rolling wave planning technique. • Uses critical path analysis when needed. • Performs analysis regarding scope, schedule, and cost using the earned value management (EVM) methodology. • Performs quality audits after each iteration. • Develops several commutation models or methods and chooses those that fit with the needs of the project and team. • Performs risk management analysis using several techniques including SWOT. • Always manages those on the project team with respect, inspiration and endless support. Show less Analyzed and resolved high tiered escalations from Apple Retail and Apple Authorized Service Providers regarding hardware repairs on Mac and iOS products. An escalation path for published service manuals. Headed Apple retail service operations to resolve all escalations within the Family Room. Supported, analyzed issues and behaviors for retail internal systems. Developed strategy plans for fix releases and bug root cause analysis investigations. Analyzed failure trends and hardware repairs on All Apple Desktops for engineering. Show less

  • AppleCare Operations Helpdesk Manager

    Jan 2014 - now

  • Project Manager- PMO

    Jan 2014 - now

  • Technical Channel Support Analyst

    Jan 2013 - Jan 2014