On Customer Experience Engineering

Customer Experience Engineering sits at the intersection of customer support, coding and product. It's an opportunity for teams to turn a frustration into a feature, or permanently deflect a whole class of support tickets.

What are Customer Experience Engineers?

Customer Experience Engineers work on the root causes of customer pain. This might be common customer complaints, or a recurring support request that swallows team resources.

Imagine your customer writes in, and they want to export all the "events" in their account. The customer might have spent ten minutes trying to find the export function (which might not exist), and reached out for help. They then waited a few hours for a response, and your team might run a DB query or an internal script to fulfill the request.

Here's where a Customer Experience Engineer steps in. They might repurpose an existing API, or build a new one, and add it to the product. They might also write a guide for customers on how to export their data, and include it in your product documentation.

What do they do?

• Dive deep into support tickets to spot patterns and opportunities
• Build self-service tools that put solutions directly in customers' hands
• Create internal tools to help support teams work more efficiently
• Partner with product teams to advocate for customer-driven improvements
• Write documentation that actually answers customer questions
• Design and implement monitoring to catch issues before customers do

A typical day might involve reviewing recent support tickets, spotting that customers are frequently asking for a way to bulk-update their team members' permissions, and building a CSV import tool to solve this forever. Or perhaps diving into why customers keep hitting rate limits, and implementing better user-facing warnings before they get there.

The best solutions often look obvious in hindsight. That export button that's now used thousands of times per month? It started as a painful manual process that kept showing up in support tickets. The clear error message that helps users fix their own configuration? That came from patterns spotted in customer conversations.

What makes a great Customer Experience Engineer?

• You're curious.
• You're empathetic.
• You have a drive to resolve repetitive support requests, however minor.
• You want to help others, and improve their experience.
• You spot patterns in seemingly unrelated customer issues.
• You balance quick wins with sustainable solutions.
• You understand that sometimes the best code is no code - just better documentation.

Real World Impact

Let's look at an example of how a Customer Experience Engineer turned support headaches into product wins:

Tricky API Endpoint: Customers reported that using the "Update Resource" API to add tags unexpectedly cleared existing ones. This happened because the endpoint required setting the entire tag list, not appending to it—necessitating a fetch, append, and update process.

The Customer Experience Engineer introduced new endpoints for adding and removing tags without overwriting existing ones. As a result, related customer complaints nearly disappeared, thanks to clearer functionality.

Where Customer Experience Engineers Fit in Your Organization

Customer Experience Engineers often act as the bridge between multiple teams. They're technical enough to work alongside platform engineers, but with a deep understanding of customer needs that comes from close collaboration with support.

In most organizations, CEEs might report to Engineering but maintain strong connections with Support and Product. Support Engineers who code make excellent Customer Experience Engineers.