Behind every great product is a strong support team. Often referred to as “customer success,” this team is responsible for helping clients navigate a company’s service and get the best return on investment. We talked to seven client success managers and team leads to see what their employees are responsible for on a daily basis. And good news: they’re all hiring.
CB Insights, a market intelligence platform, helps organizations make data-driven decisions. Its customer success team is 15 members strong and welcomes more members by the day. We chatted with Brian Power, senior director of customer success, to get a sense of what the team is like behind the scenes.
What does customer success mean at your company?
In terms of the customer, our mission is to help them achieve their desired outcomes through the CB Insights platform, intelligence and community. In terms of CB Insights, our team focuses on adoption, expansion and retention.
What are the day-to-day responsibilities of the customer success team?
The team manages the entire customer lifecycle. This includes customer onboarding and training and engagement with our platform, also conducting business reviews and serving as a trusted adviser on innovation efforts. They work closely with our sales team to expand customer relationships and execute on customer renewals.
What are three attributes everyone on the team needs to have?
-
A track record of high performance
-
Effective communication skills
-
The 4 Hs: helpful, humble, hungry and happy
mParticle, a customer data platform for omnichannel brands, has 10 people on its customer success team, and they’re looking to expand. Customer success manager Nina Kratter told us what the team does and which qualities the best candidates have.
What does customer success mean at your company?
Customer Success at mParticle is defined by customer retention, growth and satisfaction. Our role is to make sure that we offer the appropriate support, guidance and strategy for our clients to realize improved efficacy and seamless execution of their data. We strive to make sure that our customers are able to streamline their data collection and easily use all the marketing and analytics tools necessary to accomplish their goals without having to rely heavily on technical resources.
What are the day-to-day responsibilities of the customer success team?
No two days are the same. Post-sales, we are the primary relationship owner working closely with the solutions consultant who is managing the technical implementation. Once implementation is complete, we are continuously working with clients to align data execution with their business goals and help activate their analytics and marketing strategies. Internally, we work with the product team to channel customer feedback and inform our roadmap.
What are three attributes everyone on the team needs to have?
-
Empathy
-
Tenacity
-
Collaborativeness
A platform designed to streamline the arduous task of moving, Updater built its foundation on customer success. Its 12-employee team looks to expand. Director of client success Brittany Parkinson told us what she’s looking for in future team members.
What does customer success mean at your company?
Because we implement software that didn’t exist until just a few years ago, we take an educational approach to everything we do. The success team teaches clients how to implement our product, how to merge it with existing moving workflows and how to gain widespread adoption across the organization. As a team, we’re responsible for educating our clients across a variety of topics.
What are the day-to-day responsibilities of the customer success team?
The team is mainly tasked with building relationships and advocating for the client. They help with onboarding clients and training them, as well as driving engagement and adoption. They’re responsible for retaining clients and collecting product feedback.
What are three attributes everyone on the team needs to have?
-
Curiosity
-
Creativity
-
Reliability
Bettercloud provides management and security solutions for SaaS-powered workplaces. Director of customer success Michael Connery explained that the 10-person customer success team is responsible for “just about everything after a prospect becomes a customer.” Here’s what that means.
What does customer success mean at your company?
The customer success team sets clear expectations with our customers, ensuring they hit their goals throughout various stages of their customer journey. We make sure to get them to a point where they are excited to renew or grow their contract year after year.
What are the day-to-day responsibilities of the customer success team?
Our team manages just about everything after a prospect becomes a customer. A day in a CSM's life at BetterCloud could entail: goal setting and mapping an implementation with a brand new customer, having an executive business review to ensure goals are met, training customers on the latest product release, negotiating a renewal or upsell, ensuring best practices are in place — the list goes on. No two days are the same and that, in my opinion, is what makes customer success the most fun job to have.
What are three attributes everyone on the team needs to have?
-
Be a good teacher
-
Confidence and hunger
-
Be a good listener and a good asker.
Smartly.io provides advertisers with a tool to automate the online marketing funnel. The company has 160 employees, with 65 on the customer success team. In other words, almost half of the employee base is responsible for keeping clients happy. Talent team lead Ilona Sippola explained what it’s like to be on the team.
What does customer success mean at your company?
Our goal is to help our customers get better results from online marketing with less manual work. We offer our customers a dedicated account manager to help them grow their business online and utilize our product in the most efficient way. They’re experts in our product, as well as online advertising, which means that they’re able to cater industry insights to our customers to help them stay updated on the quickly changing industry.
What are the day-to-day responsibilities of the customer success team?
Customer success team members nurture close relationships with our existing customers, provide help when needed, and cater industry insights to help them succeed. They proactively approach potential customer leads, give product demos and conduct trials to close new customers. They also engage with our customers in the technical support chat to help them with their ad-hoc problems.
What are three attributes everyone on the team needs to have?
-
Intellectual curiosity
-
Strong sense of ownership of their markets, verticals and customers
-
A team player attitude
Stack Overflow provides developers with a community to help build their careers. The customer success team is made up of 11 employees around the world, and it’s looking for more members to join its NYC office. Director of customer success Korneel Bouman gave us an insider’s look at what his team does every day.
What does customer success mean at your company?
First and foremost, customer success enables the client to extract maximum value from their chosen solutions. We primarily do that by proactively working with the client to ensure they understand the product, help them adopt and remain engaged. We enable them to be self-sufficient, secure in the knowledge that we have their back whenever they need anything, be it advice, help or product feedback. Customer success at Stack Overflow is neither support or account management — rather, we work with the various departments (sales, support, product and marketing) to ensure the client’s ultimate success on our platform.
What are the day-to-day responsibilities of the customer success team?
The team does everything from answering client questions, to kicking of campaigns, to training users, to holding webinars. They hold monthly check-ins with clients and meet with internal sales, support and product teams to solve any issues and present feedback.
What are three attributes everyone on the team needs to have?
-
They have to care
-
They have to understand
-
They need to be able to communicate, inspire and persuade
Hive is a project management system that integrates over 100 tools to help streamline processes across teams. The customer success team is made up of three people and is looking to expand. Implementation manager Erin Gouveia explained all of her team’s responsibilities and what they look for in new employees.
What does customer success mean at your company?
Customer success at Hive is truly about individuals — not the customer business as a whole. We measure our impact across metrics and data to ensure we’re moving in the right direction, but it’s equally as important that we’re making a personal connection with customers and building the product based on real people. I’m much more likely to be asked, ‘When’s the last time you spoke to them on the phone?’ than ‘What’s their usage percentage?’
What are the day-to-day responsibilities of the customer success team?
It’s a mix and every day is different — on any given day, I’ll be responding to incoming customer questions or issues that come through the help/chat feature in our app or through the website, planning for an upcoming roll-out to a larger customer, speaking to our customers, or building the case for a new feature set that meets a customer need.
What are three attributes everyone on the team needs to have?
-
Flexibility
-
Empathy
-
Curiosity
