The general thought of many people is that the role of a customer support engineer is quite exciting until you think about the career path. The common belief is that a career path in support is progressing from being a product specialist to a technical support lead and most likely ends at customer support manager.
But that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, experience in customer support opens opportunities in technical writing, blogging, quality assurance, customer success, product development, product marketing, product management or even as a customer relationship analyst.
Hard to believe isn’t it?
In fact, quite long back, I had the opportunity to talk to a few support engineers who are working in other organizations with the same set of experiences which I have now. I was interested in knowing more about how their background in customer support and I understood that most of them were allocated to a single module or a feature for customer support.
In Kovai.co, we have an exciting culture.
In this blog, I’ve captured the opportunities I’m having within Kovai.co to give you an idea of our experiences as a Support engineer.
Opportunities for Support Engineer at Kovai.co
#1 Improve your customer relationship
For more than a year, the Support team has started involving in Customer Relationship meetings which are held by a separate team. We receive various feedback from our customers about the product. During the call, we will ensure that the customer is not facing any challenges and make sure they are utilizing the product efficiently.
What are the benefits?
As an outcome, we will learn the real-time problems which customers are facing according to their environment and organization. We provide suggestions and solutions to their queries quickly.
Not only do we solve the queries and provide solutions, you may hear “WOW” feedback from the customers if they are very happy with the product and we receive this feedback most of the time.
#2 Technical Writing
As support engineers, we receive common problems and challenges which are faced by the customers with the product. There may be a one-step solution to overcome the problem. So, to make it easy and beneficial to our customers, we have started writing “Tips and Tricks” articles.
What are the benefits?
Since the articles are publicly available, they will be easily accessible to all the customers, when they come across a similar problem.
We made small but significant changes to the way we write the solution articles. This made a huge difference in the way customers understand a feature.
Nowadays we write solution articles, make feature videos and give feedback to the product team on new features and enhancements.
#3 Show the world what you have experienced
As an extension to Technical writing, we convert our day to day learning and experiences towards technical challenges into blogs.
What are the benefits?
This helps us and the community to stay updated and learn the technologies. Showing real-time technical challenges which, we have faced and how we solved that problem.
Here are some sample blogs
- Interesting support cases 2018
- Troubleshooting external notification channel
- tls support in biztalk360
#4 Quality Assurance
Who understands the customer environment architecture more than a person who always handles customers challenges? Yes, it’s none other than Support engineers.
Yes, we are involved in product testing too!
What are the benefits?
This helps us to keep a variety of scenarios from a customer perspective in mind during testing. Adding these scenarios into the test cases reduced the number of defects in the product.
#5 Building the Product
At the initial stage, we had the privilege to access the code base to find the exact problem for the exceptions which customers are facing. We received an opportunity from our management to be involved in product development.
What are the benefits?
When we receive feedback or a feature request from the customer, it would be very interesting if we develop the feature ourselves. One of the finest examples is that one of our support team members developed a custom widget within a day based on one of our customer’s request.
Instead of getting back to the developer’s team for small features every time, we can develop and provide the solutions faster and it makes customers feel happy. We delivered the custom widget within a day.
This helps us to be a part of the entire development process for the product development.
Also, read How we introduced DevOps during the release of BizTalk360
#6 Building a Community
While the help group has gotten great input, there were a couple of clients who weren’t happy with our community forums. Customers felt unheard and they often reach out to our support team saying we could do better with the community.
To solve this, we have opened a new User Voice portal to capture customer feedback and suggestions.
Many customers use our feedback forum to communicate with us about the features they want to see within the product.
Initially, the development team decided upon the features for every release of BizTalk360. Now, based on the priority and the voting by other customers for the features in the feedback portal, if they think it would suit their requirements, the features are taken for development.
What are the benefits?
We started engaging with customers on the community, along with the Customer relationship team. The Forums are a channel where we get to know your customer’s pulse. Being a help individual and understanding the issues of different clients without a moment’s delay, feels incredible!
That’s why we say ‘BizTalk360 – Driven by client suggestions.
#7 Product Management
Every week on Tuesday, we conduct Support deliberation.
It’s a place where we discuss in detail regarding the support process and the challenges we faced in resolving the issues related to the product. Every participant will share their view and add points to the discussion.
What are the benefits?
With the different levels of support, it is important to share the knowledge between the team members, so that it would help them to resolve customer issues efficiently when they come across similar kind of issues.
It’s not just for the support team, the entire product team, including the developers, QA, and the documentation teams take part in this deliberation.
#8 Bring Your Customers Onboard
Everyone realizes that it is so significant to locally available a client. It’s a difficult errand to set up a project plan that’s customized to client’s need.
With each customer coming with their own set of requirements, it can take anywhere between 3 weeks and 3 months (sometimes, even longer) for the onboarding team to implement the solution.
What are the benefits?
Since the support team knows the product like the back of their hand and has spoken to many different customers, we found it easy to map their requirements to the product’s functionality and chalk out project plans.
From a Jack of Different Trades to a Master of Many
It’s a Promising Path Ahead!
While support itself is a great role to be in, the career paths it opens are very promising.
The biggest takeaway I gathered from speaking to other organizations, is that my experience in dealing with customers and what we are following in Kovai.co, knowing the product inside out, acted as a cushion every time.
It gave me the confidence to venture out and try hands at different roles.
I want to take this opportunity once again to thank everyone in and out of Kovai.co for this wonderful opportunity and believing in us. We are looking forward, for much more opportunities.
