What is Support Engineering?

In the modern world of software engineering there are many roles that might be less known or overlooked. Support Engineering could be one of them. Let’s have a look at what Support Engineering entails and how it benefits companies and helps build successful teams.

The role of Support Engineering

Successful companies these days have their own software development teams. These teams work on delivering solutions based on the business needs. This process is usually iterative. The teams have to get the business specification first, before they implement the solutions. After the specific solution is implemented, the teams work on iterative improvements and maintenance.

The solutions are not always perfect - sometimes the focus shifts or other projects are prioritized or improvements are evaluated as not worth their costs.

This is where support engineering comes to its role. A support engineering team can patch these holes and provide smooth operations for business critical activities.

The scope of a support engineering team usually entails:

• Manual actions (changes in data, manually run commands)

• Configuration (specific parameters of a system)

• Automation - setting up rules that ensure functionality without further development

• Internal tools - implementation of simplified features that help achieve goals of other teams

• Direct communication with customers regarding deeper technical support

• Triage and routing of issues to responsible teams

• Dev Support system implementation

Because Support Engineering teams help with software operations they usually also have a very good knowledge of their systems overall. Because of that Support Engineering teams can also participate on supporting major incidents and oncalls.

Support Engineering compared to other support functions

People might confuse Support Engineering with other business functionalities that focus on providing support - Customer Experience/Support (CX/CS), Tech Support and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Let’s have a look at differences between individual scopes.

Customer Experience

Customer Experience teams focus on providing the best experience for customers in terms of using and working with the business. The scope of CX teams is much broader and requires a direct communication with the customer much more often. Basically every question from the customer can be asked at CX and the team is there ready to response and resolve the issue.

While Support Engineering can also communicate with customers, the communication usually is only for deeper technical issues and solutions. Support Engineering shouldn’t be answering questions about business features in general.

Tech Support

Tech Support teams focus on providing technical support regarding the usage of system provided to customers, or IT internally.

Tech support focuses on smooth operations for customers who are using the product. Is the device you bought from this company malfunctioning? Tech support will be there to help you navigate you to set it up so it works properly. The same applies for software. Usually tech support is using their technical knowledge or existing runbooks and guides to help you resolve your issue.

The same applies for internal Technical Support or IT teams - they are responsible for individual hardware devices and their management.

While Support Engineering may also provide technical support, it usually goes deeper and focuses on specific issues or bugs and their resolution. Support Engineering should never be responsible for internal IT management.

Site Reliability Engineering

While the name may suggest that the teams are responsible for site/software operations, SRE teams usually rather focus on the systems themselves - they ensure that the infrastructure is set up properly, that it is robust and resistant to changes and not prone to downtimes. SRE teams should have a robust model for alerting and monitoring to ensure that all deployed software runs smoothly.

SRE and Support Engineering gets confused quite often, but infrastructure and availability is not Support Engineering team’s responsibility - it’s really the infrastructure and dev teams’ responsibility to ensure availability of their system. However, in case of incidents and need for support, the Support Engineering teams can work on resolving the issues without the need to escalate.

Support Engineering as Continuous Improvement

Besides providing support for a company’s systems and application through manual operations based on outcoming requests from other teams support engineering teams can also provide an advantage to the teams with feedback loops the opposite way.

Because support engineering teams are so deep in daily operations they are familiar with the system’s issues and missing features.

By collecting this information and making analysis on the number of requests per specific functionality this feedback can be shared with other internal dev teams which can realize their weak points and decide on reinforcing them by implementing these missing blocks or by improving the user experience with certain features.

This approach can help teams and businesses build systems that are resistant to further need of individual support and making them more self-sufficient, saving time and costs.

Consider Support Engineering in your company

As you could see, Support Engineering provides not only assistance with daily operations and critical tasks. It can provide all the necessary infrastructure for resolving dev support and critical escalation, including major incident response.

Distinguishing Support Engineering from other support related roles is necessary in order to gather the desired focus of the function.

If managed correctly, Support Engineering teams can provide feedback loops to other teams thanks to their familiarity with daily operations and collecting data on it.

These benefits can help companies improve their operations and become more successful and achieve a rapid growth.