The job of a customer service engineer involves utilizing key software, hardware maintenance, and repair skills to meet a company's technical needs. Most professionals in this position work for information technology (IT) firms which support larger corporate firms. These engineers must have sharp communication and customer service skills in order to understand the client's requests and explain the issues. Due to being client facing employees, professionalism is of the utmost important when dealing with any clients, no matter the circumstance.
In order to learn the skills required to properly fulfill customer service engineer duties, a professional in this position will have to obtain a degree in a related field. An associate's degree in computer maintenance or information technology will usually suffice, although a bachelor's degree might be required for managerial positions. Computer maintenance courses of study that grant an associate's degree will focus more on the practical aspects of fixing hardware, repairing networks, and debugging software. A bachelor's degree program may concentrate more on programming for enterprise level systems.
Customer service engineer jobs are usually found within the information technology industry because many of these jobs have to do with configuring Internet and wireless networks to fit the needs of a particular company. Professionals in these positions learn all that they can about the IT industry by taking lower level technical support or customer support jobs while in school or while training for a future as a higher level customer service engineer. They will also learn certain computer programming languages that are pertinent to debugging and running batch scripts which fix software, such as C++ and Java. These customer service engineers that are more interested in repairing hardware will take time to complete outside projects having to do with constructing hardware, such as building their own computers and other technical devices.
As a professionally trained employee in a customer facing role, a customer service engineer must always be able to clearly understand the client's needs and communicate that to the relevant personnel in his or her company. Although the bulk of work in this position is done alone while repairing systems, it is still expected that he or she can communicate well with others. People in this position are often the face of the company, and managers expect that such experts will carry themselves in a professional manner whenever on site.
