Customer Success Manager

Oh My Job is a webseries dedicated to discovering jobs as explained by in-the-field professionals. In this episode, Guillaume, a customer success manager, tells us about his job and day-to-day tasks at Partoo.

A customer success manager’s job is to help clients get the most out of their product or solution so that they continue to be loyal customers. 

Career path

They usually have business degrees, but their backgrounds can be slightly varied. Part marketing, part sales, support, and tech, it is a crucial position whose diversity makes it a fantastic starting point in a career.

“Normally, you go to business school. Or engineering school to gain the technical side to supervise projects. ”

Responsibilities

A customer success manager works in after-sales, following the prospection and gain of clients by salespeople. Their role is to:

• Help the customer in getting the best out of their solution/product by advising, training, and responding to their needs and expectations as best as possible
• Transfer customer feedback to the product teams to implement improvements
• Spot high potentials and encourage upselling (additional sales)
• Generate customer loyalty
• Be the primary customer contact for after-sales support

“For me, the most challenging part is to provide truly exceptional service to each of my customers, regardless of the size of their portfolio.”

“The biggest mistake is thinking that you have a client forever, when, in fact, it’s an everyday battle; you must constantly provide value to them.”

Skills

A customer service manager’s array of missions and their interactions with different departments require a wide variety of skills:

• On a technical level, they need to understand today’s technologies fully and have a real affinity for everything digital. 
• They also need to have a flair for sales to be able to spot upmarket opportunities for customers who are ready for change and to understand product life cycles.
• To the extent that customer success managers have contacts with all types of people, with varying degrees of technical savvy, they must possess acute soft skills and be excellent communicators, know how to adjust to each individual they come in contact with, and work well in teams.
• If the company they work for has their eyes set on working internationally, being able to speak the target language is a real bonus.
• In short, it is a position where multi-tasking is demanding. The job covers everything and entails a vast amount of responsibilities. You have to be organized to do it all.

“It’s a combination of several jobs: part project manager, part business consultant, part salesperson.”

Collaborations

In-house, the Success Team Department is the intersection between several worlds:

• They need to interact with the product team to give feedback on the many observations and ideas about the design of the service (or product) and its features.
• The same goes for the technical team—they maintain regular contact for rapid, pertinent support to customers.
• They work daily with the sales teams to ensure a smooth transition from prospect to customer and to handle any after-sales issues.
• Lastly, customer success managers work hand in hand with the marketing team as brand ambassadors.

Salary

In the US, the average salary is $65,000 annually. 

“(The salary) depends on how the company is set up. In some, renewals and additional sales will be under commission, but not for others.”

Career progression

The diversity of a customer success position is a real stepping stone for career development.

Internally, they can become team leader and take over the position of head of customer success.

If they find themselves attracted more towards sales, one of the possibilities could be the position of a key account manager to gain the skills needed for complex sales and managing key accounts.

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