Customer Engineers – How We Make Others Cool [ENG]
Note 2024: Customer Engineer role has evolved in name from PFE to CE and now CSA (Cloud Solution Architect), but the same nature persists.
«What exactly is it that you do at work?» is a question everybody in IT has answered many times. I got it asked periodically by my parents and other family members. More than a year ago I wrote another article explaining how I landed here and how you can do it as well.
During the last year everything seems to have changed. The world where we live and work is a different world, but also the job that we do is different. As you may have noticed already, all Premier Field Engineers in Microsoft are now called Customer Engineers. Is that just a name change? Definitely not.
In the past, PFE team was perceived as a “firefighting” role. Customers and partners found our team traveling all around the world to fix issues, solve complex escalations and train our customers to prevent the same issues from happening again. In general, taking problematic situations to a stable position and keep it that way.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”—Bill Gates
The new Customer Engineer (CE) role’s overall idea is to put our customers at the center of our own goals. Last time I explained it to my father I told him we are now like a “snowplow”. We remove blockers, so the issues I mentioned above do not even happen.
We are still a technical team. We still debug, isolate and troubleshoot errors. We work with customers and partners to optimize performance throughput and review customization best practices. We share knowledge and train our customers and partners so they get the best out of our products and technologies on continuous evolution.
We are still part of our customer’s IT teams, trusted advisors helping them provide the best possible service to their companies and acting as a bridge with other Microsoft teams.
But we also help customers envision their digital transformation, assess their migration path to the cloud, accelerate adoption of new modules and technologies (including the whole Dynamics 365 platform, both ERP and CRM, but also the Power Platform), help them govern and control their cloud environments and, in general, we clean the snow in the road so they can achieve more.
Our only goal is that they succeed, that’s the “Customer Engineer” meaning.
“You join here, not to be cool, but to make others cool” — Satya Nadella
Do you want to join us in the journey to make others cool? We have some open positions in the team. Don’t take the country list very seriously, we are open to hire elsewhere if we find the appropriate talent, please choose the one closer to your location:
- Customer Engineer – Europe – Business Applications (Both ERP and CRM) [outdated]
- Customer Engineer – MEA – Business Applications (Both ERP and CRM) [outdated]
- Customer Engineer – Americas – Business Applications (Both ERP and CRM) [outdated]
Published first on LinkedIn, let me a comment there to see your thoughts!