How to Diagnose Your Customer Engineering Friction Points Before You Outsource Anything

You have one customer engineering problem. Seems easy enough — you should hire someone to fix it. 

But sometimes, it’s not that simple. 

It might have happened to you already: You outsource customer engineering support based on one friction point and hire someone to fix it without thinking about the rest of the value chain. 

Then, every contract cycle, your outsourcing partner heads out the door. 

Our CEO Alex Mortman and COO Jeff Givens have 14+ years of experience building and scaling outsourced customer engineering programs for enterprise clients, and they know that only a full-program audit can help you move forward instead of restarting at square one every year. 

Their framework can help you surface actual bottlenecks in your customer engineering program so you can find a partner that solves for everything, not just your strongest pain point. 

Why enterprise customer engineering programs stall out and why “adding headcount” rarely fixes it

If you deliver complex technical products to your customers  — like cloud infrastructure, SaaS platforms, financial software, etc. — chances are you’re going to (or already did) hit a wall with customer engineering support. 

Maybe you can’t get engineers in front of customers fast enough. Maybe you can’t find engineers with the right skill set. Maybe your operational infrastructure is a drag on your core business.

Alex and Jeff know that usually the friction point a company thinks it has is rarely the full picture. 

When a large software company first brought JDA in, they had a simple problem: Their enterprise clients had to wait 94 days for a customer engineer, even after their $10 million services contract was signed. 

There was a serious speed gap between client expectations and enterprise delivery.

JDA quickly realized that the delay wasn’t because of understaffing. 

The company’s processes, approvals, and training timelines had picked up so much “white noise” that hiring couldn’t clear the backlog.

Institutional speed was lagging, and beneath it all: 

• HR, IT and compliance were focused on hiring and managing CE talent, which pulled their focus from the business’s core product
• The required technical expertise didn’t exist internally, or was too thin to scale
• Siloed communication kept departments from supporting CEs, which slowed down handoffs

When companies pick one friction point and swing a sledgehammer at it, they’re just making a mess without thinking about the whole building. A full program redesign prevents any reactive problem-solving and can address those lag issues. Think of it like approaching the patient with a scalpel instead.

You can’t fix what you haven’t seen. Look at the whole value chain.

Before any solution can be designed, you have to run a complete audit of the existing program.

It might sound obvious, but it’s not too common. Most of the time, you’ll invite outsourcing companies into a conference room and watch them present off-the-shelf solutions, all before considering the big picture. 

That’s exactly why the outsourced CE space has a churn problem.

A “tear it down and start over” mentality almost always leads to resentment, and destroys whatever is already working. The right frame, instead, is to say: “We’re making changes to what you’ve built, not replacing it.”

At JDA, Jeff says, “We do not go in making assumptions. We do not come in with a product off the shelf saying, ‘This is how you need to run this program.’ We want to understand how it currently runs. We want a full lay of the land first before we start deriving our own opinions.” 

For a customer engineering outsourcing program to actually work, it has to be built on a complete diagnosis of the existing program.

And that’s all before any solution is presented. 

4 steps for turning a chaotic CE program into one that scales

Step 1: Conduct a full-program audit first

Don’t jump right in. 

“When a prospective client asks us, ‘What’s your off-the-shelf solution?’ We’re going to tell them: ‘If someone is offering you an off-the-shelf solution, they didn’t get to know your business, and they didn’t get to know your culture,’” Jeff says. 

Look into how your current CE program is structured across every dimension: 

• Talent attraction and evaluation
• Onboarding
• Training content and delivery
• Manager-to-IC ratios
• Manager training
• Metrics
• Interdepartmental communication

You should also take into account what employees, managers, and end clients think about the program through surveys, direct conversation, and KPI data.

This is how you tease out the difference between the friction point you’re already aware of and the friction points you missed.

Step 2: Evaluate whether the program’s metrics are actually measuring what matters

Industry metrics might be the standard, but that doesn’t mean they’re right for you.

Alex points out the gaps he’s seen: “Are they measuring loyalty? Are they measuring optimization? Are they measuring renewals?”

Once you see what data you’re tracking, you can pressure-test those metrics: Do they actually reflect program health, or are they just grandfathered-in KPIs?

For example: JDA found that the software company was tracking speed-to-onsite but not contract renewals, dedicated service add-ons, or customer satisfaction scores. When JDA started tracking those, they were able to get a clearer picture of the real financial impact CE performance was having.

When you have full visibility into both program health and performance indicators, you can start designing the build, starting with people.

Step 3: Define the right talent profile (don’t let the financial model affect it)

With the proper metrics, you can create a talent profile that drives those metrics. Don’t rely on margin targets to come up with potential hires. 

Ask yourself: What does it cost to hire engineers who can deliver the experience the metrics are designed to track?

“We’re enabling all of our resources with innovative technologies to make them smarter and stronger and faster,” Alex says, but human intelligence is a crucial part of a successful program. That’s where you start.

Step 4: Invest in onboarding and training as a signal of early program health

“Where I start to get excited and feel like we’re on the right track is when you start to compile the team and you can feel both the energy and enthusiasm that they have,” Alex says. 

And those people are set up to succeed if they’re onboarded properly: with competence and ownership in mind. 

Alex’s key metric is not operational (like pass rates or completion times) but based on attitude. If the new engineers are already generating opinions and improvement ideas, he knows the program has the right foundation.

What a well-built CE outsourcing program actually produces

Speed and quality outcomes that exceed the original brief.

“They may say that success looks like having people on site within 30 days. But what we find is that we can get people on site within five days,” Jeff says. “And on top of that, we’re also able to get contract renewals up by 20%. And on top of that, they want this customer engineer to return and have a dedicated contract for the next five months.” 

By leading with the audit, you’re often able to surface performance improvements you didn’t know to look for.

You won’t just see faster speed-to-service. You’ll also notice renewal rate increases, dedicated contract add-ons, and financial metrics that CE wasn’t driving before.

Relief from operational ownership.

“What we hear from clients all the time is they feel a sense of relief that they don’t have to figure this all out themselves,” Alex says. 

In a strong partnership, you can focus on your core work, and let your partner ideate and push the envelope to improve their programs.

When the build is done well, you’ll stop thinking of the outsourced partner as a vendor and start thinking of them as a co-owner.

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Understanding what you truly need to fix before you start building is part of doing your work well, and the partners worth hiring know that. When you can identify your friction points properly, and pick your outsourced partners based on that, you’ll build a genuine competitive advantage in how you serve customers. 

FAQs

We’ve already tried outsourcing our CE function once and it didn’t stick. Why try again?

The most common reason outsourced CE programs fail is that the partner came in with a pre-built solution rather than a diagnosis. Your partner should do a full audit of your program’s culture, metrics, and internal communication before proposing a fix.

Can an outside partner understand the technical complexity of our product well enough to represent us in front of enterprise clients?

Yes. There are always going to be people out there with the expertise you need. The right outsourcing partner will define the technical profile your customer-facing engineers need to meet first, then build compensation and margin targets around that. If a vendor is working in the opposite direction, that’s a red flag that they’re not optimizing for your customer relationships.

How do I make the business case for a full program overhaul instead of hiring more?

The data. When CE programs are audited properly, companies routinely discover performance gaps they weren’t tracking: renewal rate increases, dedicated contract add-ons, and customer satisfaction scores that were never connected to CE performance. Framing the audit as a revenue visibility exercise, not just an operational fix, can get buy-in from finance and the C-suite.