Customer engineer skills: a missing link
Hiding, relaxed, in plain sight
I planned to spend some time digging deeper into interviews and technical exercises, but I realized something as I started to get my thoughts together.
In all of my writing over the last month or so about the hiring process, things to look out for and evaluate, and the most important skills to have as a support engineer, I realized that I missed one key skill. So before I continue on my deeper dives into the individual parts of the hiring process, interviews and tech exercises, I wanted to take a moment to expose and discuss this missing link.
I won’t bury the lede here: for most support engineering roles, an underrated but absolutely essential skill is unflappability. What do I mean by that? Well, some people might call it stability, grace under fire, sangfroid, equilibrium. It’s the ability to take whatever’s thrown at you and not get rattled or lose your composure. And in any live situations with the customer, once you lose your composure, it’s very difficult to get the session back on track.
When you start to panic, you miss obvious things. You jump to conclusions and take drastic actions that may actually make the situation worse, all in an attempt to just solve the problem before things get even worse. If the customer sees you panicking, they will either panic themselves or immediately begin to mistrust everything you say and do, seeing that you’re not thinking clearly.
Contrariwise, an unflappable engineer can take unexpected setbacks in stride, never losing her cool, and behaving just as calmly when everything is on fire as when she’s answering a simple documentation question. An unflappable engineer won’t make things work by acting rashly or without thinking. Most importantly, she helps keep the customer calm by projecting that air of stability. By remaining calm, the message conveyed is ‘this is no big deal, the situation is under control’. A big component of this air of calm and stability is deceptively simple: slow down. Even if everything and everyone around you is deep in crisis mode, don’t rush to act. Take your time and be very careful about your actions, and you’ll avoid deepening the crisis through taking poorly considered steps. Similarly, remain calm while speaking with peers and customers, and you’ll avoid freaking them out even more.
That leads to one more important thing about unflappability: like so many mental skills, it is in some ways a confidence game. Now I don’t mean to say that it’s somehow illegitimate or disreputable, but that it is quite literally based on confidence. If you are confident that the issue is solvable (or at least that you have a path forward), your own confidence will help keep you calm, and in turn help keep everyone around you calm. Others’ perception of you becomes reality, and all of a sudden things don’t seem quite so disastrous.
So why did I neglect to mention this earlier? I think it’s because this skill is so foundational, and so transparent, that it’s easy to miss. But its absence will be sorely missed as soon as the engineer starts interacting live with customers.
Side note: where is this less important?
Now, it’s also important to note that, as I alluded to above, unflappability isn’t required in all support jobs. If your role doesn’t have a live interaction component—if all support is via email, for instance—it’s okay not to be quite as good at this. When there’s space to take a deep breath, maybe work off a little nervous energy, before responding to a customer issue, it’s okay for an engineer to get rattled and need a little time to recover. Carefully evaluate your support team structure and needs before deciding that this needs to be a major component of your candidate profile.
How to evaluate
Okay, so unflappability is important. How can you evaluate this? Well, there’s an easy way, but unfortunately it’s probably not the right way. If you keep throwing curveballs in your interviews and live exercises with the candidate, never letting them get into a regular rhythm, you’ll discover pretty quickly how easy it is to faze them. Easy enough, right? But this is also a terrible way to conduct interviews. You want to see your candidates at their best, and give them every opportunity to show you what they can do. If they’re spending all their time trying to keep up, there’s no room for that. And beyond that, it’s aggressive and simply rude. Most candidates will be thoroughly turned off by an experience like this, and for good reason.
And that leads to the essential paradox: unflappability is incredibly important, but the best way to evaluate it—attempting to stress out and throw off the candidate—is also a completely unacceptable way to conduct an interview. So how can you suss out a candidate’s unflappability without, well, trying to flap them? I’ll dig into this a little more when I do my deep dives on interviews and tech exercises, but in brief: water it down. Gently push back in interviews, challenging the candidate’s responses, asking follow-up questions that may be a little unexpected. Put some small traps in your tech exercises, nothing overwhelming, but enough to give the candidate pause. How they handle smaller hurdles won’t tell you for sure how they will handle larger disasters in customer settings, of course. But if they go to pieces over minor pushback, that tells you that they may have trouble with setbacks in real-world situations.
Don’t despair
To conclude, a few words of encouragement for managers and engineers: unlike some of the skills on the list, unflappability is one that can be taught, practiced, and improved! If you or your employees are having trouble keeping your cool while handling challenging customer issues, all is not lost. Practicing in a controlled setting, perhaps with a colleague role-playing as an upset customer, can go a long way to improving your composure and ability to function well in stressful live interactions. It’s worth putting the time in to improve this skill, because the better you are at it, the more smoothly your troubleshooting sessions will go, and the better your customer relationships will become over time.
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