Support vs TAM
Fight! Again!
Introduction
Returning to my occasional series of Support vs Everyone, I’d like to talk about another team that works closely with Support. In fact, sometimes (or often) they’re confused with Support. But make no mistake, technical account managers (TAMs) have a very different purpose. This week we’re going to talk about the two different roles and how they can best work together.
First, for anyone who’s not familiar with the term, a TAM is generally tasked as a technical adjunct to customer success managers (CSMs). As a member of the customer success organization, a TAM’s goal is to ensure a successful technical onboarding for new customers, help expand the product’s use across a customer organization, and generally remove technical roadblocks from the customer’s effective deployment and continued use of the product. Sound familiar? There’s a lot of overlap here with Support.
Similarities
Let’s start by looking at what customer engineers and TAMs have in common. First, and most obviously, are the technical skills both roles share. TAMs are a technical resource for customers specifically for the deployment and use of your company’s product. You can’t be an effective TAM without having a deep understanding of the product, how it’s deployed, and what its common failure modes are. TAMs need the same kind of knowledge base as customer engineers do: an intimate knowledge of the product and its quirks, a strong technical background and troubleshooting mindset, and a knack for working with highly technically oriented customers. In many cases, the onboarding and training process for TAMs and customer engineers is the exact same process, including shadowing customer troubleshooting sessions and technical deep dives with the engineering organization.
Customer engineers and TAMs also have one more thing in common: a strong customer orientation and empathy for customer problems and priorities. Like customer engineers, TAMs interact daily with the people who are actually using your company’s products. This grants an intimate understanding of customer environments, use cases, and pain points. As such, both teams are strong customer advocates within the larger organization. TAMs and customer engineers both work closely with CSMs to help determine engineering priorities for bug fixes, and Product team prioritization for feature requests and longer-term roadmap items.
In light of these similarities, Support will often take on TAM-like tasks in smaller organizations where that role doesn’t yet exist. When the customer base is small, customer engineers are able to build a similar sort of longer-term relationship with individual customers they help day after day, and will work closely with CSMs to ensure new customers are onboarding successfully. But as the company grows, and the overall support load increases, that level of individual relationship is no longer plausible for customer engineers and the customer success organization needs to bring on one or more TAMs to maintain those technical relationships.
Where they differ
Customers that have an assigned TAM have a first point of contact for any technical questions or issues during and after onboarding and a sounding board to discuss new use cases or expansion. While customer engineers are also just as capable of fielding questions like this, TAMs have the advantage of focus. They have a specific portfolio of customers and work with them throughout the entire customer lifecycle, starting from the very first onboarding. This lets them build strong relationships over time and develop an intimate understanding of each of their customers and their particular use cases, environments, and personalities. Customer engineers handle support issues coming from across the entire customer base, and as that group grows larger, there’s less time to become and remain familiar with any particular customers or environments.
As I implied above, TAMs are focused first and foremost on customer relationships. Technical assistance and strategic technical advice is the main way they build and maintain those relationships, but it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Customer engineers, on the other hand, may (and hopefully do) build strong customer relationships in the course of solving customer problems, but those relationships are a side effect, not the main purpose. Another way of putting this is that TAMs take a more strategic approach than customer engineers do. Customer engineering is inherently a reactive role, primarily focused on solving problems. TAMs are able to take a more proactive approach to customer technical needs, helping the customers reach their technical and business goals over the course of a long-term strategic relationship. The flip side to this strategic focus, of course, is that customer engineers tend to develop a broader troubleshooting skillset. Because they deal with a wide variety of customer issues, across your company’s full customer base, they will see more and trickier support issues than any given TAM.
In organizations with TAM teams, those teams coordinate more closely with CS than Support does. In most cases they are under the same organizational umbrella and individual TAMs are often paired with individual CSMs, so they share accounts and work closely together over time. Support, in order to help CS, has to build explicit handoff and knowledge sharing procedures. For TAMs this knowledge sharing and handoff back and forth with CS is much easier to establish, as they are regularly in communication with each other already, and often tag-team customer meetings.
Side note: designated (or dedicated) support engineers (DSEs)
In larger organizations, DSEs are a hybrid of sorts between customer engineers and TAMs. Like customer engineers, they’re capable of solving the trickiest technical issues, as they’ve spent their time in the customer engineering trenches and have seen everything. But like TAMs, they’re dedicated to one or a few specific customers. Over time they develop a deep understanding of their individual designated customers, and build TAM-like relationships with those customers. But I’m going to pass over them for now, partly because I’m talking about TAMs, and partly because DSEs don’t generally enter the picture until your support team has grown large enough to create this role, and your customer base contains enough enterprise customers that DSEs start to make sense as a support option.
How they can work together
So given the fact that customer engineers and TAMs have overlapping, but largely distinct, responsibilities, how can they best work together? Where are the appropriate demarcation lines?
To begin with, when a customer has a designated TAM, the TAM is likely to become the first point of contact for all technical issues. Whether or not the customer is encouraged to send all support issues to a standard support inbox, people tend to communicate more with their existing contacts so they’ll end up reaching out to their TAM rather than opening a formal support ticket. The TAM then serves as an initial triage for incoming issues, and can decide what to handle themselves and what to pass to the customer engineering team. TAMs are the natural home for more strategic and relationship-based issues. When things start getting more technically complex, TAMs may need to rope in a customer engineer for more unusual or involved troubleshooting, but should stay in the loop so they can handle similar issues on their own in the future.
On that note, the TAM and Support teams can both learn something from each other. By sitting in on each other’s technical calls, and conducting regular knowledge-sharing sessions, product knowledge and troubleshooting tips can cross-pollinate easily from one team to the other. Customer engineers can improve their relationship-building skills, and learn to think more strategically. TAMs can pick up more advanced product knowledge and troubleshooting.
Because of the significant overlap in skillsets, TAMs and customer engineers are also very capable of moving from one team to the other. If a customer engineer finds they really enjoy the relationship-building and strategic planning aspects of working with customers, they can easily bring their skills over to the TAM side. The same is true in reverse—if a TAM needs a change of scenery, or would prefer to move in a more technical troubleshooting direction, the Support team would welcome their input. As a support leader, building close ties with the TAM team and its leadership is a smart investment in your team’s skill building and in its future.
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!