The Hindu Business Line : With you, right through

The best product support engineers combine solid product and technical knowledge with empathy, logic and intuition. These are not qualities that can be generated by stepping through a prepared series of questions, such as ‘Have you turned the computer on?’

Ramesh Kalanje

India is becoming a hub for enterprise-level product support services.

Companies are ramping up operations and investing substantially in infrastructure and people to provide high-end technical product support to customers worldwide, from India.

Driving growth in this space are several factors: Enterprise Product Support can help customers speed up time-to-market for products, reduce costs by minimising downtime of business-critical enterprise applications and data, and optimise the return from existing resources.

Product support relationships help customers resolve critical issues and provide continued support and maintenance long after deployments and installations are done.

India’s abundant and highly qualified talent pool, coupled with the fact that the country is an R&D product engineering hub for many companies, makes it an attractive destination for product services.

Unprecedented opportunity

The business of enterprise product support services is evolving.

Support services have long been an integral part of overall customer experience, providing a vital interactive link between a company and its customers. Now, across the marketplace, companies are seeking new ways to increase customer value and strengthen customer relationships.

This need creates an unprecedented opportunity for product support organisations to go beyond their traditional reactive function, and become proactive leaders in customer value creation.

Support engineers form the backbone of the service delivery in this environment and have challenging and complicated job profiles.

They assist technical customers with product migration and builds to installing new software and technologies. They are primarily involved in post-sales support but are also engaged occasionally in pre-sales opportunities.

Combining knowledge with intuition

Product Support is a specialised independent function, analogous to development and testing. It requires cross-functional domain enterprise, sophisticated technical and functional know-how of the products and a good understanding of multi-vendor environments. The support offered is conveyed to the customer with simplicity and effectiveness. It ensures that every customer has access to highly focused assistance and expertise.

Support engineers bring domain knowledge on technologies, often having worked in product engineering, and are also good communicators to let customers understand the solutions that are being recommended.

The best product support engineers combine solid product and technical knowledge with empathy, logic and intuition.

These are not qualities that can be generated by stepping through a prepared series of questions, such as ‘Have you turned the computer on?’

Effective product support engineers understand what customers really mean, as opposed to what they might say, when describing a problem.

If they do not understand, engineers are perceptive enough to ask straightforward questions. They’re also aware that that they need to be in learning mode all the time as sometimes even if the solution seems obvious, it may not be right.

Job rotation desirable

I’m a strong advocate of job rotation between development and support roles for the above reasons.

Support engineers working in development bring a very strong background on customer requirements that can be implemented in product development.

This is also true of development engineers joining support teams and getting a perspective on how the products they developed are being used at the customer’s end.

In terms of career growth, product support engineers will be able to develop their social networks, interact with customers, and stay close to evolving technology.

Since the resolution of customer problems is of high importance to any product company, the visibility factor is high and high performers have an accelerated career path.

No canned answers

The nature of work is also satisfying, for both the engineer resolving the problem as well as the customer.

A product support person can’t get by on canned answers to common questions, because we’ve eliminated the common questions by fixing the software or having an extensive knowledge base where the customers can find answers to most common problems.

This is across all software product companies, so the engineers have to actually troubleshoot, which often means debugging. This kind of work actually keeps a person challenged and keeps them motivated to do more.

To retain support engineers, it is crucial that companies provide them with a career path and structured professional development.

Some best practices to retain engineers and keep them engaged include: providing training in different technologies; creating distributed leadership at different levels; integrating roles such as training, coaching, strategic support, team leadership and subject matter expertise with customer contact responsibilities; and developing a supportive environment and promoting a sense of ownership among the engineers.

The author is Director-Global Services, India Centre of Excellence, EMC Corporation.

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