Team Lead, Customer Success job description

Customer success — Team Lead, Customer Success
Coaches a pod and owns the accounts most at risk of churn.

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 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 shorten time to value for a whole customer segment by redesigning the path rather than pushing individual accounts, and you make the case with evidence people accept.

Account Growth
- Customer Health Scoring — You can adjust which inputs and weights a health score uses when it stops predicting outcomes, and defend the change with evidence.
- Product Adoption Analysis — You can tell a real adoption problem from an artefact of the data, and explain to a customer executive what their own numbers mean. Colleagues bring you the accounts whose data does not add up.
- Quarterly Business Review Facilitation — You can coach others to run stronger reviews, and personally run the reviews where the relationship is most at risk.
- Customer Success Plan Development — You can build a plan for an account with conflicting stakeholders or a goal nobody has stated out loud, and get the customer executives to commit to it in writing. Colleagues ask you into their hardest planning sessions.
- Churn Risk Identification — You can build the watchlist process a team uses to catch churn risk early, and correct it when it is catching the wrong accounts.
- 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 build advocacy out of accounts that were difficult, including customers who once escalated, and you coach colleagues on making the ask without straining the relationship.
- 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 work spanning several teams, negotiate scope and sequencing with their owners, and maintain one shared plan that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work spanning several teams, name the assumptions each figure rests on, and re-cut the plan as those assumptions break.
- 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 bring in practice from outside the organisation and make it work here, and your judgement demonstrably improves the projects you touch.
- 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 hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.

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)