Head of Customer Success job description

Customer success — Head of Customer Success
Sets support and success strategy and owns retention company-wide.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Support Operations
- Support Ticket Triage and Prioritisation — You can set the triage and prioritisation standard across the whole support organisation, and decide when a new ticket type needs its own rule rather than a judgement call.
- 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 policy for the support organisation and negotiate it with customers and leadership, balancing cost against the commitment being made.
- Support Escalation Ownership — You can set the escalation policy for the support organisation, including when a customer is told the plain truth about an unresolved issue rather than given a placeholder update.
- 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 set the incident communication standard for the organisation, including what triggers proactive outreach and what a post-incident letter must contain.

Onboarding
- Customer Implementation Planning — You can decide how implementations are planned across the organisation, including the templates, the staffing model and the point at which a plan is escalated. You change how partner and services teams plan too.
- Product Training and Enablement Delivery — You can set the enablement approach for the organisation, deciding what is taught live, what becomes self-serve and what is retired, and show the effect on customer adoption.
- 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 set the time-to-value target the organisation works to and hold product, sales and support to the parts of the path they own. You get the changes made in teams you do not manage.

Account Growth
- Customer Health Scoring — You can own the health-scoring model for the whole customer base, deciding what it measures, and retire it in favour of something better when it stops predicting churn.
- Product Adoption Analysis — You can decide which adoption measures the organisation trusts, and get product to instrument what is missing. Your reading of the data changes what the company builds.
- Quarterly Business Review Facilitation — You can set the review standard and cadence for the whole customer base, and decide which accounts need a different format altogether.
- Customer Success Plan Development — You can set how success plans are built and reviewed across the organisation, including what makes a plan worth keeping, and you get sales and product planning against the same customer outcomes.
- Churn Risk Identification — You can set the churn-risk methodology for the whole customer base, and decide which risk is worth intervening on versus accepting.
- Expansion Opportunity Identification — You can find growth in accounts where the signal is not in the usage data, such as a new team forming or a sponsor changing, and shape the case before sales picks it up.
- Renewal Readiness Assessment — You can call the renewal on an account where the signals conflict, such as strong usage under an unhappy sponsor, and build the case that wins it back. Your forecast is the one people trust.

Customer Voice
- Product Feedback Routing — You can weigh feedback across the customer base so product hears the pattern rather than the loudest account, and you say no inside your own team with a reason people accept.
- Customer Reference and Advocacy Development — You can decide how advocacy is run across the organisation, what it asks of customers and what they get back, and you get marketing and sales working to the same approach.
- Customer Community Engagement — You can revive a community that has gone quiet, or hold one together through a launch that upsets people, and you develop the customer moderators who keep it running.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run the organisation's largest and most contested programmes, and the planning practices you introduce get adopted by teams you do not lead.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast at the scale of quarters and headcount, and the estimation practice you set is what the wider organisation plans against.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can take on the outcomes the organisation is most exposed on, and other leaders route ownerless problems to you by default.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organisation by building the tooling and habits that make the careful path the easy one.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organisation has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole class of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practised beyond this organisation, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organisation invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organisation communicates, and the forums and norms you create measurably improve how information travels through it.
- Collaboration — You can dismantle the barriers that stop teams working together, and how the organisation collaborates changes because of what you built.
- Technical Writing — You can set the writing standard the organisation works to, and documents you authored are still in use long after you moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organisation in its most consequential relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organisation, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organisation grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong practitioners.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organisation's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- HubSpot Service Hub Software Certification (required from Senior Support Specialist)
- Zendesk Support Administrator Expert Certification (required from Customer Success Manager)
- Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator (required from Team Lead, Customer Success)