Typical duties of customer support engineers, customer's test engineers and on-site system test engineers?

Question

Is there any difference between customer support engineers, customer's test engineers & on-site system test engineers?

I particularly want to know the typical duties for each role, how they are different from each other, and if any of them perform user acceptance testing.

Answer 1

Well, everyone might put their own meaning to the terms mentioned by you, but as it seems to me what you have listed is ranged by the product awareness:

1. Customer support engineer is usually a kind of operational engineer who knows how to use the system. Hence they might perform support tasks: some maintenance or managing the users, or accessing the database directly to investigate what could cause the issue.
2. Customer's test engineer is an engineer that is hired on customer side. They have the expertise in test and they perform acceptance testing (not the same as User Acceptance Testing). They have to have more technical skills that support engineers have and they have to know the system better. But still not so good since they are outside the development process.For example, customer's test engineers might test how well the system can be installed in customer's infrastructure. Vendor's test engineers cannot do that effectively due to access limitations.
3. Onsite test engineers are the test engineers which are hired by the software vendor, but physically work in customer's office. They are inside development process so that they have the deepest awareness of the product. They also have testing expertise but normally having such kind of engineers is more expensive than having own engineers.

Answer 2

Of course there are many differences in all the terminologies mentioned by you.

Cust support engineers are the one who gives complete support to the customers via phone or email or other medium of communication.

Cust test engineers are a kind of DOMAIN Experts, who is hired by the customer from the office in order to do the USER ACCEPTANCE testing as the TE will have complete product knowledge.

On site test engineers are the one who are working in foreign countries as the test engineers for a company which also has the operations in other countries. On site test engineers are mainly Automation test engineers.