Customer Success Manager job description

Customer success — Customer Success Manager
Owns a book of accounts through onboarding, health and QBRs.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Support Operations
- Support Ticket Triage and Prioritisation — You can set the triage rules a team follows, catch tickets that are being mis-prioritised as a pattern, and retrain the process rather than fixing one ticket at a time.
- Product Troubleshooting and Diagnosis — You can lead diagnosis of the hardest recurring issues, decide when a workaround is acceptable versus when a fix must be forced through, and coach others through a first difficult diagnosis.
- Support Queue and SLA Management — You can set SLA targets that match what a team can actually deliver, and change staffing or process when a queue is structurally missing them.
- Support Escalation Ownership — You can run the escalation process for a team, decide when a ticket needs executive visibility, and fix the handoffs that keep losing context.
- Bug Reproduction and Reporting — You can lead reproduction of defects that several engineers have already failed to pin down, and improve the reporting template from what kept going missing.
- Multi-Channel Support Delivery — You can set channel strategy for a team, deciding what belongs on chat versus a call versus a ticket, and coach others whose channel switching is costing time.
- Customer Incident Status Communication — You can manage communication across several simultaneous or major incidents, and decide when a customer needs a call rather than another email.

Onboarding
- Customer Implementation Planning — You can plan implementations that span several customer teams, competing deadlines or a scope nobody has pinned down, and you name the risks early enough for someone to act on them. Others bring you their stuck plans.
- Product Training and Enablement Delivery — You can enable a large or sceptical audience, including sessions where the product is not what the room hoped for. You coach other trainers and the sessions they run get better.
- Self-Serve Help Content Authoring — You can restructure a help centre section that is failing readers, and settle the arguments about voice, depth and where a topic belongs. You edit other writers and their articles improve.
- Onboarding Milestone Tracking — You can see the pattern behind slippage that repeats across accounts and fix the cause rather than the account. You are trusted to call an onboarding at risk before the tracker shows it.
- Time-to-Value Acceleration — You can work out what first value means for a specific customer, cut the steps that do not lead to it, and show the time saved against a comparable account.

Account Growth
- Customer Health Scoring — You can interpret a health score alongside the story behind it, catching cases where the number and the reality have drifted apart, and act on the gap.
- Product Adoption Analysis — You can read the usage data for your accounts and say, with reasons, whether a customer is realising value, then act on what you find rather than only reporting it.
- Quarterly Business Review Facilitation — You can run a review for a complex or strained account, adapting the agenda to what actually needs to be heard, and steer it away from becoming a status readout.
- Customer Success Plan Development — You can agree a success plan directly with a customer that ties what they do in the product to a business outcome they care about, and you hold both sides to what was agreed.
- Churn Risk Identification — You can read weak or conflicting signals across a portfolio and prioritise which at-risk accounts need attention first.
- Expansion Opportunity Identification — You can judge which signals are real expansion opportunities and which are noise, time the handover to sales well, and follow through until the opportunity has an owner.
- Renewal Readiness Assessment — You can judge whether an account is on track to renew, evidence that judgement, and start work on a risk months before the renewal date rather than weeks.

Customer Voice
- Product Feedback Routing — You can turn scattered requests into one well-evidenced problem statement, and you push back on the solution a customer asks for to get at the need underneath it.
- Customer Reference and Advocacy Development — You can judge which customers make credible advocates, ask at the right moment, and land a reference or case study without the relationship being handed to you.
- Customer Community Engagement — You can grow participation in a community space you own, get customers answering each other instead of waiting for staff, and handle a difficult thread in public.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run a multi-person project end to end: you set the scope, track the dependencies between the people involved, and re-plan when reality moves.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into milestones, and hold the estimate up under challenge.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can be the person the team consults on your area, and you follow where the field is moving and apply it where it pays off.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and refuse a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can take charge of work with no clear owner, motivate people who do not report to you, and make calls others are willing to follow.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- HubSpot Service Hub Software Certification (required from Senior Support Specialist)
- Zendesk Support Administrator Expert Certification (required from Customer Success Manager)