Support titles: what's in a name?
Rosa rosa rosa est est
If you’re starting to put together a support team, you may wonder: what do I call these people? This is an important question to spend some time on! First of all, it sets the tone for the team going forward. A support engineer feels qualitatively different from ‘helpdesk’, or ‘customer support’, or even ‘customer engineer’. Beyond that, different titles will attract different kinds of candidates. Think about what your support folks are going to be doing before you decide.
If they’re going to be doing basic tech support, then anything with ‘helpdesk’ in the name will point to:
Lower- or entry-level
Simple tech tasks
Primarily or exclusively internal customers, e.g. coworkers
Often in-person support
Answering end user or B2C customer questions is often summed up by ‘customer support’. These jobs are typically:
Lower- or entry-level
Basic product support, sometimes technical
Customer service and satisfaction issues
Phone, email, or web-based support
As you get more and more technical, such as supporting a B2B SaaS product (to choose a not so random example), it makes more sense to put ‘engineer’, ‘technical’, or both in the title. ‘Support engineer’ implies:
Phone, email, or web-based support
Option for in-person or (more likely) screen-shared troubleshooting
In-depth product support, more technical
Able to resolve technical issues reported by technical users or administrators
A newer title that is gaining broader use in the field is ’customer engineer’. This role is equivalent in most ways to ‘support engineer’, but with the added connotations of:
Deeper ability to understand customer’s business contexts and use cases
Sensitivity to customer mood and risk of churn
Ability to address some issues that traditionally belong to customer success, such as feature requests and product frustrations
In brief, ‘customer’ is in the title because this role is more proactive and customer-focused than the more transactional, ticket-based support engineering function.
Which one are you trying to hire for? Name your role accordingly and you’ll already be halfway towards finding the right candidates to help your new support organization grow and thrive.
Next time: let’s start actually recruiting and hiring.
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