WHAT DOES A CUSTOMER SUCCESS MANAGER DO?
Published: September 19, 2024 - The Customer Success Manager fosters and enhances relationships with customers, ensuring effective communication and problem-resolution strategies across the company. This role involves acquiring deep knowledge of the company's systems to provide targeted training and support, while also serving as a trusted advisor on Brinqa products, including their integration and platform features. Additionally, the manager interfaces with internal teams for issue resolution, tracks customer service requests, identifies upselling opportunities, and coordinates with commercial teams to optimize customer experiences.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Customer Success Manager
1. Customer Success Manager Duties
- Customer Onboarding: Onboarding new customers and ensuring they are well-steered for deployment as quickly as possible.
- Account Management: Managing numerous customer accounts throughout the whole lifecycle and proactively renewing contracts.
- Adoption Strategy: Driving the successful adoption and onboarding of RoadSync at key organizations to help customers realize the business value of the platform and partnership.
- Point of Contact: Providing a consistent point of contact through the onboarding lifecycle.
- Business Consultation: Understanding clients' business challenges and industry trends and consulting on how RoadSync can help them achieve their objectives.
- Risk Management: Monitoring product engagement and intervening as early as possible when risks and problems arise.
- Client Engagement: Engaging with multiple clients to address satisfaction, retention, and growth.
- Utilization Enhancement: Driving higher levels of adoption for clients who are underutilizing the RoadSync solution.
- Relationship Reporting: Reporting weekly on client relationships, including issues and threats.
- Industry Knowledge: Maintaining knowledge of trends in the payments industry.
- Trend Documentation: Documenting and updating trends within clients' industries.
- Statistical Analysis: Analyzing statistics to increase client retention.
2. Customer Success Manager Details
- Relationship Management: Manage and cultivate the relationship and communication with customers.
- Issue Resolution: Drive resolution of production issues, including escalation, strategy sessions, and distribution of knowledge throughout the company.
- System Knowledge: Acquire and maintain knowledge of existing systems and new systems in order to provide accurate assistance and training to customers and the CS team.
- Product Advisory: Act as a trusted advisor for Brinqa products and understand features, such as integration to sources, platform features, and all applications.
- Internal Liaison: Interface with internal groups for problem resolution and issue escalation.
- Customer Advocacy: Act as the liaison and customer advocate inside Brinqa.
- Issue Tracking: Track customer issues via the Service Desk for communication and resolution.
- Upsell Identification: Contribute to identifying upsell opportunities and new use cases.
- Campaign Reporting: Create campaign reports and maintain information flow within the company.
- Effective Communication: Communicate efficiently with colleagues and internal teams, and present findings in a comprehensive way.
- Client Participation: Participate in client meetings and assist with system testing.
- Returns Management: Ensure the end-to-end process for returns is executed in a timely and efficient manner.
- Commercial Collaboration: Work with commercial to recommend returns to customers.
3. Customer Success Manager Responsibilities
- Carrier Advocacy: Act as the voice of the carrier partner across the organization.
- Partner Experience Optimization: Optimize every aspect of partner experience to foster engaged and collaborative partners.
- Account Planning: Work with the Account Management team to establish account plans for each carrier partner based on a deep understanding.
- Initiative Deployment: Deploy initiatives internally and externally focused on reaching these objectives and frequently communicate milestones.
- Cross-Functional Coordination: Work cross-functionally with strategic and technical colleagues to coordinate timely follow-up on requests, issues, and open questions from carrier partners.
- Meeting Facilitation: Facilitate the planning and execution of Quarterly Business Reviews and other partner meetings.
- Metrics Tracking: Track all relevant business, product, and customer support metrics and present those regularly as part of internal KPI reviews.
- Feedback Translation: Engage with Product and Customer Support teams to translate customer feedback into product requirements and drive usage and retention of carrier products.
- Marketing Support: Provide partner marketing support and consult regularly on temporary and permanent placements to drive the adoption of carrier products in the market and support revenue targets.
- Industry Awareness: Stay up-to-date on relevant industry developments.
- Clear Communication: Convey complicated information in written and verbal communication that is simple, clear, concise, professional, and friendly.
- Continuous Improvement: Work continuously to problem-solve client and deployment challenges and improve the process, data, and productivity.
4. Customer Success Manager Job Summary
- Client Relationship Management: Managing client relationships across multiple levels of the organization.
- Usage Reporting: Driving and reporting of usage of the solution against client-defined objectives.
- Innovative Solution Development: Developing innovative solutions to help clients achieve goals.
- Internal Collaboration: Collaborating with internal teams on the clients’ behalf.
- Expansion Coordination: Coordinating with the sales team to identify expansion opportunities.
- Marketing Collaboration: Working with the marketing team to refine client marketing solutions.
- Customer Success Strategy: Working with leadership and cross-functional teams to drive customer success strategy ongoing.
- Customer Success Experience: Experience in a customer success role with a Software as a Service (SaaS) company.
- Business Acumen: Strong business acumen and executive-level presentation skills.
- Interpersonal Skills: Strong interpersonal and effective communication skills.
- Time Management: Excellent time management capabilities.
- Team Collaboration: Must thrive in a team-based environment.
- Pressure Management: Ability to deal with high-pressure situations with poise, diplomacy, and tact.
5. Customer Success Manager Accountabilities
- Client Management: Manage and prioritize a diverse client book of business.
- Feedback Collection: Collect client feedback regularly and escalate to the appropriate stakeholders.
- Business Mastery: Learn and master clients' businesses and help them use technology to implement solutions that are specific to their needs.
- Product Expertise: Become a product expert to onboard, train, and implement the efficient use of data in existing client milestones.
- Business Reviews: Conduct quarterly business reviews and leadership kickoff meetings with client sponsors.
- Use Case Discovery: Discover and vocalize new client use cases.
- Issue Resolution: Respond to customer issues and deliver client satisfaction.
- Success Strategy Ownership: Identify and own customer success team strategy and improve upon processes, including onboarding, learning and development, certification, and client outreach.
- Usage Analysis: Analyze customer software usage and create effective campaigns to increase customer engagement.
- Feature Promotion: Promote customer awareness of all new features and releases and offer insight to ensure maximum adoption.
- Relationship Building: Develop strong relationships with the client’s key constituents and decision-makers.
- Project Leadership: Lead client projects through completion to leverage the platform in the optimal way that adds value to customers.
- Scope Coordination: Plan, coordinate, and monitor scope, requirements, schedules, budgets, resources, tasks, risks, staff, and deliverables.