Five important lessons I have learned on my way to a senior customer support engineer.

1. Get to know project stakeholders and your team.

Yes, this may sound trivial but it is in fact quite an essential thing if you want to understand stakeholders and their values, influence, and roles at the project. All stakeholders manage people at the project. Once you get to know them (project owners, leaders, customers, etc.), you can apply the core needs of the business to your approach and as a result, consider and perform your role better. The better you know the team the better and faster you communicate and find solutions, and thus, provide high-level solutions and services.

2. Develop your skills: soft and hard.

We can hardly imagine a professional who stays at the same point for years. Active attitude to growth is a sign of a good professional regardless of years of experience. Pay attention to developing your business communication, language level, and other soft skills together with your technical expertise to convert this into new ideas, improvement suggestions, high performance, etc.

3. Collect feedback and measure results.

Every project has its KPIs and guidelines to follow but not always these can give you a full overview of your job. Review pieces of feedback from end-users, from your customers, and management, even from your co-workers. Analyze the whole picture to define potential weak points and growing problems. Even bad feedback is a source of improvement.

4. Take a look from the end-users’ perspective.

When I start a project, the first thing I do is assess the project as the end-user. I try to order an item in the store, set up an advertising campaign, launch the game to understand what the end-user experience is. The importance of this point is that end users are those who generate the wealth and success of the project. This will allow you to understand what problems they may encounter.

5. Take the initiative.

Have no fear of taking initiative and expressing your ideas! This is the blocker for lots of newbies as well as for experienced workers everywhere. In fact, every customer will appreciate your attention to the project and desire to make it better.

If you manage to consider all the points above in complex - you know your customer, apply your business communication skills and experience with end-users and their problems, keep an eye on things to improve, then you will always find your path to success on any project.