WHAT DOES A CLIENT SERVICE MANAGER DO?
Published: July 22, 2024 - The Client Service Manager stays up to date on debt management services by attending educational workshops and shadows sales representatives to meet sales trajectories. Advises consumers on financial solutions through accurate cost calculations and develops tailored debt relief plans. Supervises and educates team members, ensuring compliance with company policies and maintaining digital signage within the club.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Client Service Manager
1. Client Service Manager Duties
- Management: Manage a remote team of technology services staff from technician to senior engineering level.
- Design: Design, develop, monitor, and manage a service delivery model that is focused on a unique and highly differentiated Customer Experience.
- Achievement: Meet or exceed revenue, utilization, margin, and customer experience targets through the successful delivery of projects.
- Development: Help create technology solution offerings that streamline the implementation process.
- Engagement: Engage with customers and act as the management sponsor of key projects.
- Customer Service: Address customer inquiries, resolve issues, and obtain customer feedback proactively.
- Support: Support teams in the achievement of service goals including coaching, weekly reviews, performance management, training, and direct supervision.
- Account Management: Manage, measure, monitor, and consistently meet with customers each month as part of technical account management.
- Strategy: Manage all facets of account management by creating comprehensive account management plans that provide a clear IT roadmap strategy to deliver their core business objectives with clear timelines and actions.
- Review: Ensure annual service reviews with every client detailing the value they receive from existing contracts, and introduce product updates and new products and services with the goal of retaining every customer.
- Negotiation: Lead contract re-negotiations creating strategic renewal options leveraging upsell and cross-sell options.
- Value Maximization: Help the customer receive maximum value by placing more or all of their business with Varsity.
- Sales: Actively lead and participate in front-end sales cycles for identifying and closing new engagements and opportunities such as upsells, upgrades, technologies, etc.
2. Client Service Manager Details
- Campaign Management: Drive, implement, and oversee all campaign activity from brief to completion for all allocated client accounts, including ownership of mid-senior level client communications, commercial responsibility, and project management.
- Client Relationship: Manage all aspects of the client relationship, ensuring on every campaign the team is delivering against the client’s KPIs, monitoring budgets, and proactively proposing new business ideas.
- Client Liaison: Be the lead client liaison on all assigned campaigns, keeping everything on track and everyone internally and externally informed of progress.
- Client Satisfaction: Be accountable for client satisfaction across all assigned clients.
- Issue Resolution: Work closely with the Campaigns team to resolve any issues in regard to quality of content and speed of delivery.
- Client Ownership: Proactive, consultative client ownership and anticipating client reactions and responding accordingly.
- Expectation Management: Manage internal and external expectations and crises.
- Feedback: Gather feedback, leading and following up on meetings in person and by phone.
- Follow-ups: Engage in ongoing follow-ups with clients to check in on progress and assure project success.
- Communication: Ensure clients receive clear and consistent updates in person and via email/phone on a daily and weekly basis to discuss any ongoing issues with the campaign and mitigate any potential risks.
- Relationship Building: Build strong client relationships built on trust, function as a business partner, advisor, and relationship lead for clients.
- Commercial Liaison: Liaise with the Commercial team to understand all agreed commercial terms and campaign deliverables.
- Briefing: Ensure there is no stone left unturned when leading the briefing to the Campaigns team on what needs to be delivered.
3. Client Service Manager Responsibilities
- Sales Development: Proactively identify and develop plans to sell through incremental campaigns with existing clients to drive repeat business.
- Relationship Building: Build relationships with and leverage internal experts in order to upsell services to existing clients across the business.
- Client Support: Assist the Commercial team by supporting prospective client activity.
- Strategy Development: Develop and present strategies at client and team meetings.
- Budget Management: Support the Campaigns teams to manage campaign budgets to ensure performance and delivery.
- Senior Budget Management: Manage client budgets at a senior level and ensure margin is being tracked regularly.
- Finance Assistance: Assist the Finance team with client invoicing.
- Account Leadership: Be the account lead, working closely with the Campaigns team to deliver campaigns on time and within budget.
- Communication: Regularly communicate campaign status and escalate potential business risks to key internal stakeholders on an ongoing basis.
- Subject Matter Expertise: Serve as a player-coach/subject matter expert for the client account specialists.
- Issue Resolution: Resolve escalated issues quickly and provide backup coverage for the level 2 client account management team as needed.
- Pipeline Tracking: Track and forecast pipeline of project revenue and sales opportunities.
4. Client Service Manager Accountabilities
- Knowledge Maintenance: Maintain professional and technical knowledge by attending educational workshops to stay up to date on new debt management and relief services offered by clients.
- Sales Shadowing: Shadow the sales methods of sales representatives and Account Management staff to emulate their sales procedures to meet sales trajectories.
- Financial Advising: Advise consumers of financial solutions they qualify for by completing accurate and punctual cost calculations and financial reviews.
- Solution Development: Develop tailored solutions for each client to conquer their debt concerns and focus on their immediate and long-term debt relief objectives.
- Software Proficiency: Complete knowledge of the club software systems including a scheduler, reports, etc.
- Team Supervision: Assist in training and supervising all team members while department heads are not present by helping to delegate projects and responsibilities.
- Team Education: Educate team members and members on the proper company policies and procedures.
- Policy Enforcement: Ensure team members consistently execute the basics in punctuality, dress code compliance, friendliness, and cleanliness.
- Decision Making: Act and make decisions in the best interest of the club.
- Work Schedule: The general work schedule will be evenings and weekends.
- Signage Management: Manage the digital signage throughout the club (remove old/expired messages and insert new/upcoming messages).
5. Client Service Manager Tasks
- Strategy Development: Develops strategy and drives tangible results across the team while leveraging data from a multitude of sources to tell a story and impact the overarching strategy.
- Service Improvement: Drives ongoing service improvements and projects involving quantitative and qualitative analysis.
- KPI Management: Develop analysis and reports to manage KPIs and SLAs and actively identify opportunities at the team and individual levels for process, service, and team improvements.
- Reporting: Generates and shares comprehensive weekly and monthly analytical reports about team performance, SLA, and commercial objectives to top management and Omni team.
- Forecasting: Report on daily/weekly/monthly key metrics and build forecasts based on trends and targets and support in corporate updates and presentations.
- Process Improvement: Provides management with recommendations on streamlining and improving processes.
- Industry Awareness: Stays abreast of industry best practices by reading publications, benchmarking sister brands, and competition to identify trends in the retail luxury and retail CS industry.
- Collaboration: Lives the OmniChannel collaborative mission by effectively partnering with teams within and outside of the OmniChannel department (E-Commerce, ALC, Demand Planning, After-sales, Supply Chain, CRM, Merchandising, Training, and Retail teams).
- Policy Development: Develops policy and procedure manual for internal processes and flows to support service, sales, and OmniChannel queries in collaboration with Sr. CS QTY, Fraud, and Escalation Manager.
- Training Collaboration: Collaborate on onboarding, training/development programs for the CS team and partner with Training and Merchandising on content to align with company priorities.
- Project Support: Partners with OmniChannel team to support new developments and their roll-out.
- Staffing Management: Manage staffing models based on call volume, sales, and forecasts.