Do you really know what a Tech Support Engineer does? Sure, this might be the person that answers when you call the help desk, but you may be surprised to learn that they’re often not just waiting around to help you. Several essential duties separate a technical support engineer from other help-desk related roles.

Let’s take a look at this role so you can understand it, whether you’re applying to be one or you’re hiring for your business.

What is a technical support engineer?

Technical support engineers provide troubleshooting and tech support services to a wide range of internal and external clients across many industries, including telecom, healthcare, and financial services.

Just about every large company has its own IT department, and the main function of that department is to provide tech support. Medium- and large-size companies often separate their technical support into two areas:

• Those engineers that help internal departments and employees.
• The representatives that are client-facing, talking with customers who have called in or started a live chat seeking help.

Typically the technical support engineer is a mid-career position that provides high levels of job satisfaction. Most technical support engineers work in the field for around 20 years before moving into other tech roles outside of support. Individuals looking to career path into tech support should seek a degree in computer engineering, computer science, engineering or technical discipline depending on the type of company they’d like to work for.

This job requires a skill set that includes:

• Technical knowledge
• Soft skills like communication, flexibility, patience, and problem solving

Technical support vs customer support: are these the same?

A technical support engineer by any other name may still have the same goal: providing technical support when needed in order to elevate the customer experience to a positive one.

The technical support team may also be called the customer support team depending on whether customers are internal or external. There’s no one size that fits all flow chart to describe how all companies should structure their technical support. Some offices may have an IT department with one or two technical support engineers. Others have a robust and organized network ready to deploy for customer support.

Some titles that you might find under the latter include Chief Services Officer, Customer Services Manager, Contact Center Manager, Process Analyst, Business Analyst and Issue Manager.

Regardless of the size or robustness of the technical support team, the responsibilities of the technical support engineer remain remarkably similar. That includes troubleshooting hardware and software problems, answering inquiries and documenting results.

A senior or team-lead technical support engineer likely only handles Tier 3 escalations and above. They spend most of their time working with monitoring tools, implementing system updates and upgrades, developing big picture tech support strategy and ensuring team success with accountability measures.