Engineering Solutions to Achieve Customer Success

The Incode Omni platform offers powerful capabilities to Incode’s customers. To properly harness these capabilities, Incode provides Solutions Engineers to shepherd the implementation of customer solutions. In this installment of “Life at Incode,” Solutions Engineer Rich Komarovskiy explains what he does every day and how this contributes to customer success.

What is your background, and when did you join Incode?

I have worked for the last decade as a full stack developer, software engineer, and solutions engineer for five technology companies, and have spent the last few years working on financial applications for payroll processors, payment processors, and banks. I joined Incode Technologies last January as a Solutions Engineer in the Customer Success organization.

What does Incode’s Customer Success organization do?

As its name implies, our organization devotes itself to the success of Incode’s customers. Other companies may have a “customer support” organization that focuses on solving problems after the sale, but such a mindset does not necessarily lead to delighted customers. With a “customer success” outlook, a company focuses on understanding what “success” means to each individual customer, and the company then devotes itself to collaborating with each customer to realize its goals.

What exactly does a Solutions Engineer do?

When I introduce myself as a Solutions Engineer, I often get a blank look. “Solutions Engineer” is not as sexy or trendy as “Software Engineer,” so most people have never heard of the job title.

I explain it like this: if a solution is an answer to a problem, and an engineer is someone who designs systems such as computer systems, then a solutions engineer is a person who solves business problems using computer systems. Solutions engineering requires both business savvy and a broad technical skillset. It is a unique and dynamic role.

How so?

The dynamic nature of the Solutions Engineering position comes from the distinct roles that Solutions Engineers fill. These roles make the job interesting and challenging.

One of the main roles that a Solutions Engineer fills is the role of a consultant. Incode software often needs to operate with a customer’s software. The task of ensuring that two computer systems can communicate with each other is integration. Incode software allows multiple methods to integrate with customer software. Customers may ask questions about an integration’s feasibility, and the pros and cons of a particular integration approach. They want to understand how a particular integration may affect the computer system and business metrics. As a consultant, it is my job to know the ins and outs of the system and be able to communicate that to stakeholders.

A Solutions Engineer must also work as a programmer. For example, if a company performs a process frequently and manually, it is a viable candidate for automation. A Solutions Engineer learns the ins and outs of the process and builds tooling to help automate and scale the process.

A Solutions Engineer must also fill the role of data analyst. Stakeholders, especially executives, love metrics. They ask questions about how distinct parts of the system are performing and want visibility into changes in an easy-to-understand format. For executives and other users, a Solutions Engineer builds dashboards that explain key system metrics immediately. This not only requires the technical capability to design the SQL queries that populate the dashboards, but also requires the business understanding to identify those metrics that are most important to the executives.

Does a Solutions Engineer solely support customers, or does the Solutions Engineer also need to support others?

A Solutions Engineer sometimes must support people inside their company. I often find myself supporting non-technical employees inside Incode itself.

For example, another of the roles of a Solutions Engineer is the technical support role. Obviously, customers will often have questions about how the Incode system works. At the same time, employees at Incode also have technical questions about system operation. Whether the question comes from outside or inside the company, the Solutions Engineer must be able to answer any technical question.

Coupled with the technical support role is a documentation role. It is common for different people to ask the same technical questions. Rather than answering the same question over and over, a Solutions Engineer needs to document the system so that users or employees can find the answers themselves.

Does a Solutions Engineer fill any other roles?

There is one additional role that a Solutions Engineer fills, and it is a critical one. The best way to describe this role is as a “gap finder.” Software systems can be exceptionally large and complex with many stakeholders. Sometimes there is a requirement for a feature that is not possible from a technical perspective. It is a Solutions Engineer’s job to identify that gap. They must then communicate the gap to the stakeholders and help determine how to fill that gap.

Does the Solutions Engineer job ever get boring?

It never gets boring! Every customer has a different technical architecture, and every customer has different business needs, so every day presents a new challenge. For every customer, I must take the flexibility of the Incode Omni architecture, application programming interfaces (APIs), and software development kits (SDKs), and decide how best to apply Incode Omni to a customer’s particular needs.

In closing, how does the Customer Success organization benefit Incode’s customers?

Our team examines both the business aspects and the technical aspects of each deployment. Because of the assistance we provide, we can ensure that every customer uses the Incode Omni solution to realize their ultimate goals.