There are many different types of engineers out there across a board spectrum of engineering work. Thinking along a business workflow, you have engineers supporting sales - presales engineers. These engineers focused on building minimal viable products (MVPs). Typically these engineers operate in a product company with a reasonably versatile product.

Further down the process, you have your customer support. Having been through an enterprise setup, you will be aware of the concept of Service Level Agreements (SLA) levels. Typically further up the support level, you have your customer support engineers. Typical issues are escalated to these engineers.

Even as an engineer in a client conversation, you don’t want to be a ‘flower vase’ with no input into the conversation. Strong productive engineers are able to engage with the end users of your product. Strong engineers contribute to the value of the product and focused on the business outcomes. As an engineer, you need to know how your users are actually using your product through first hand feedback. What else should a customer success engineer focus on to value add the customer success team?

In this article today, we will walk through the 10 points of a strong customer success and reflect how an engineer could also value the customer success process inspired from the youtube.

“Secrets to Optimal Client Service,” With Jim Donovan

As you raise up in rank as an engineer, your role is not solely technical anymore. You need to learn how to work with business stakeholders - supporting them, advising them or explain root cause analysis in simple terms in which they can follow and thereupon explain to clients.

For the reason above, the principles will also be relevant to you. The mentioned principles are consistent with general stakeholder management principles:

1. Make the individual on the other side look good
2. You are paid for a service - to solve problems for your client
3. Make the individual feel good

Rules of thumb for Strong Customer Service (as a software engineer)

1. Never use jargon

You want to hold a meaningful conversation with your clients. A meaningful conversations allow all parties in contribute to the discussion. You can only contribute if you understand the topic at hand. If you use jargons and your clients don’t know what is that, they will feel stupid. If they don’t know what is going on, they will pretend they will know and the conversation will not be meaningful after.

Either ways its not purposeful for your meeting. You want to focus on engaging your clients at level in which they feel productive and sufficiently confident to participate.

Now there could be instances in which the topic are technical in natural, this requires us to review the pre-meeting preparation process. If you call for the meeting, you set the agenda alongside the client - we will cover this in point 11. If the agenda is technical in nature, you would have to call for a technical ‘translator’, a business analyst or their technical consultants, into the meeting.

As an engineer, you don’t sound smart when you use jargons, you sound irrelevant, un-relatable and potentially arrogant.

2. Pause - slow yourself down

The ultimate goal is to engage with your client meaningfully. You can consider 2 specific approaches:

A) Speak calmly and collectively. When you slow down, it calms your nerves and you can present yourself better in front of your client.

When you slow down, you find yourself listening better - listen not to reply, listen to understand. When you listen better, you can understand the client’s needs. You can find n 11 point article on how to listen better here.

B) Speak with appropriate pauses between points or sentences.
You wish to engage, which means it has to be a 2-way conversation. You need to give space for a response and that can be done by providing pauses. When you pause, you create vacuum/empty space. Your client could then step in and provide input - now you have a dialogue and you have a conversation.

In general, all client meetings have power imbalance. The client has more power. Pausing creates uncertainty and that shifts the power in our favour.

An advice: Take 5 seconds to pause after the person has completed his/her sentence, then reply.

You are in no hurry to rush through your points, take it slow, listen actively and respond meaningfully.

3. Look for opportunities to give the client advice that is not in your interest

Give them an advice that are not in your interest. A small blemish on whatever you are advocating/selling can help to amplify the positive traits of your pitch. Do this without tripping over your own points.

You are hired to solve their problems, help your clients to see that first. Assure them that you have the best interest at heart; at times even above your own where it’s possible.

4. Ask open ended questions

2 general points:

• Ask a lot of them
• Avoid answers that will land on yes/no answers.

Your goal is to facilitate an open flow of information into the conversation, finding the right questions to induce these flows is your leverage. You will learn things and you can do your job better. You understand the client’s psyche and what are on their mind regarding the work at hand.

You want your clients to talk about themselves and they will enjoy the meeting - associating the meeting in a positive way.

Instead of: do you find yourself stuck with this current workflow?
Ask instead: what are your key pain-points in this current workflow? I see you seem uncertain earlier.

The key to open-ended questions is to follow the framework of curiosity. Be curious about what is happening on your client’s end, that could lead to purposeful questions and thereupon conversation.

5. Be positive - be upbeat always
   All conversations are an exchange of energy, people want to talk to people that adds onto them. Learning how to add onto others would create an attraction to who you are. This way you have gotten people’s attention.

You have been hired to solve their problems, not there to voice your problems to them.

6. Be careful about mixing business with social activities

In the context of project delivery, your goal is not to socialise through a game of golf. Your goal is to execute. Clients hire you because you are smart and work hard. So be smart and work hard.

7. Be humble

When you’re asking open ended questions, about client’s background, about their business. make comments that indicates humility and are complementary to your client.

An example of a compliment which signals humility and genuine admiration:
e.g. What you have done with your company is extraordinary.

Please be genuine, people can sense when you’re not.

8. Be available - be responsive
   Tell the client upfront immediately that they are important to you
   Tell them that you will be available to them whenever they need you. Then you need to back it up by being responsive.

If they email you, respond immediately. You may not know the answer in the call or in the email. Respond immediately and let them know you will get back to them.
This immediate response invokes a perceived urgency that makes them feel important. If they are, make them feel so.

Very important at the early stage of the relationship.

Very important to create a strong first impression. You want to give client a strong impress that they are important, and you will be responsive.

Extremely important at the early stage of relationships.

9. Take a position - tell the client what to do
   Clients are hiring you to give them advice, don’t equivocate, don’t back down, don’t be nervous.

Tell them what you and your firm will advise them. its fine to present options, but advocate for 1 option.

Come in as a consultant, strong in the space you are in the meeting for.

10. Control the meeting

If you are meeting a client or prospect, its your meeting. Don’t let anyone hijack the meeting, don’t let the client or anyone in the client hijack the meeting. Don’t let them take you off topic.

If someone ask you something unrelated to the topic in discussion.

Some responses are:

• “Great question, let me get back to it in 10mins”
• “its a great point, im going to cover that shortly”.

Don’t let them side track you, you will do a bad job in the meeting, you will lose confident of the client. You won’t deliver the meeting in the way you like, you won’t cover all the materials. If your clients suffer, you will suffer.

11. Have an agenda, get the client to buy into it, and take notes

Have an agenda and write things down. Walk into a meeting with an agenda then communicate that agenda to clients right upfront. You want to signal you are prepared to engage them at their issues and problems.

This provides a strong sense of assurance - which is what they are essentially buying - based on [Jobs To Be Done Theory(https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done)

Example:
Today: i thought we cover the following things 1, 2, 3. Does that make sense?

• Ask specifically, you want to get buy in from the client on the agenda
• Make sure they are bought in and own the agenda together with you
• If they want to add or remove anything from the agenda.

This will set the meeting right for a long way in the meeting.

Write it down or not. Whatever it is, write it down. Its endearing, it conveys to client that you are not going to drop a ball, you won’t forget whatever they asked us to do.

At the end of the meeting, recap the follow-up items:
“we have the following followup items 1. 2. 3.”
The client will feel less anxious, perceive that we are in control.

Think of the example of a waiter, taking your order. That is a good example of how clients will feel when you do a proper recap.

Example:
Even if you have a casual conversation that ends up with an actionable.

• make sure to recap the followup items to ensure expectations are managed.

TLDR

Regardless of your role in a meeting, as you raise in ranks, there will come a day you will need to drive your meetings. Even if you are a software engineer, you may grow and become a principle software engineer. You will have a team taking directions from you and you want your team to feel good, feel supported and feel motivated to move along side you.

You will still need to be humble, you will still need to solve their problems and need to take a position and advise the team. All the points aforementioned are relevant.

But most importantly, be humble in your interaction with anyone at work.

Resources

“Secrets to Optimal Client Service,” With Jim Donovan