Customer Success Manager: Importance and Main Roles
Zeynep Avan
We make a lot of effort, spend hours, and drink cups of coffee to ensure our business’s success. The effort we make might go for nothing if we cannot make sure that the customer has a positive experience with the product or service. There should be a bridge between our business and customers to ensure a positive experience; that bridge is your customer success manager.
In this scenario, customer success managers are the ones who keep that bridge strong and create outstanding connections between the product and the end user.
The roles of a customer success manager have evolved over the past few years as companies have realized the importance of having a dedicated person solely responsible for offering exceptional connections to their customers.
In this article, let’s get deeper into the role of customer success managers and the importance of their work.
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What Is Customer Success?
Customer success (CS) is the process of engaging customers in a way that results in a positive experience and retention. CS encompasses all activities designed to create value for customers, whether it’s through understanding who your audience is and what they need, creating an engaging experience, or building a lasting relationship.
Is customer success a sales job?
Customer success isn’t just about sales. While sales are one part of customer success, it’s not the only thing you need to focus on. You should also care about things like retention, satisfaction, and loyalty. It means that customer success is about long-term relationships. A successful CS strategy will take time and patience, but it will pay off over the long term if you do it right.
Is customer success a stressful job?
Although it seems such a joyful process to create real connections with customers, customer success is a stressful job. You must constantly think about what you are doing and why it matters to the customer. Especially when it comes to different customer profiles; not everyone always is very kind and open. But customer success is also rewarding. It feels pretty rewarding when you hear a sincere word from a user after your hard work.
Who Is a Customer Success Manager?
When it comes to evaluating the key responsibilities of the customer success manager role, we can say that the customer success manager is the performer of a company’s overall customer success strategy.
Customer success managers are the key systems administrators in a company’s customer support operations, and they use their knowledge of their customers’ needs to inform product development and improve the overall user experience.
Customer success managers must be knowledgeable about the product because they need to be good at building relationships with customers and keeping up with trends in the industry.
Given their critical role within a business, customer success managers should be well-compensated for their work. They should also have access to training, mentorship, and other resources to ensure that they are prepared for the challenges that will inevitably arise as they help customers learn about the products they use.
Why Is Customer Success Important?
Customer success is the key to a company’s success. It’s how a business handles its relationship with its customers and is essential for attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. It’s also important in determining whether a company can achieve and sustain growth.
Achieving customer success starts long before a product or service is launched. It involves planning and preparation, and it involves looking at everything from the quality of the product or service to the customer experience that you want to provide. Achieving customer success also involves ensuring that your company is aware of what your customers are saying about you so that you can learn from their experiences and improve your approach.
It’s also important to think about how you can improve the customer experience throughout the lifecycle of a product or service, from concept to launch to ongoing support. For example, at launch, you might want to create a smooth onboarding process for new users; over time, as more people use your product or service, you may want to keep improving your onboarding experience by adding more features or functionality.
Difference Between Customer Success Managers and Customer Service Managers
Customer success and customer service (or customer support) managers have a few things in common, but their daily tasks and responsibilities differ.
Features and Technicalities vs. Outcomes and Practical Advice
Customer service managers make sure clients who encounter problems with a product or service can get the help they need, while customer success managers focus on helping customers achieve their desired outcomes with the product.
Proactive Approach vs. Reactive Attitude
Customer success is proactive, while customer service is reactive. Customer success teams focus on clients’ health, engagement, and retention. Customer service teams focus on solving complaints.
Long-term Strategy vs. Short-term Goal
A customer success manager’s job is to create long-term relationships with customers and make sure they’re satisfied, while a customer service manager’s job is to reactively solve problems as they arise.
Customer service managers might have a more reactive and short-term focus, but they are also important for keeping customers happy in the present moment.
It is crucial to employ both types of managers, though, in order to create a well-rounded customer success strategy.
What Are the Main Roles of a Customer Success Manager?
Lead Customers to Correct Use Cases
Even if users are well aware of their problems and needs, leading them to the proper use case that meets their needs is more important. Let me give a very simple example. I would know if I have a stomachache, but the doctor will lead me about my medication.
One of the key roles of a customer success manager is to comprehensively understand customer problems and needs and develop the most effective use case for them.
Sales and customer success at the early stages might work jointly to achieve the desired result. But, with or without the sales process, proper communication on a use case that customer success teams perform will also affect a customer’s buying decision.
Even after this process, regular communication on customer needs will ensure customer retention for the long term.
To make it possible, customer success managers should seek an opportunity to talk to customers face-to-face (quick meetings), actively follow up on their activities, and provide excellent support when needed.
Bridge the Way Between the Customers and the Product
Customer success managers should always remember that customers only have as much experience with the product as they need. They might be unaware of the functionalities and services that can benefit them or simply have question marks on their mind about the product.
The role of the customer success manager here is to remove all the question marks, listen to their feedback, help them to understand the product, and eventually act as a bridge between the customers and the product.
This even becomes a two-sided act. On the customer side, a customer success manager should be the face of the product. However, a customer success manager should be the customers’ voice on the product side.
If this communication process stays strong, it leads to better relationships between the customers and the product.
For example, if you have a customer who wants to give you feedback about the functionality of your product or suggest a feature request, you’ll be the person that they will contact first, not the development team. It doesn’t matter where they reach out, but you should always be a good listener.
Additionally, being a bridge does not always mean going back and forth to find the solution. Customer success teams should also be good at presenting alternative solutions to meet customer needs more quickly.
Keep Customers Updated and Engaged with the Product
A basic requirement of any customer success strategy is to be able to communicate the benefits and product updates to customers. A good customer success manager will keep customers engaged with your product and maintain a positive relationship.
This way, customer success managers can advocate for the company and influence customers by keeping balance on both sides and retaining satisfaction. Keeping customers updated and engaged with the product can help connect the customer needs to the business strategies.
Onboard New Customers
New customers are the lifeblood of any business, so it’s important to make sure that customer success managers are doing everything they can to get them through the door.
Apart from the all methods like mailing lists or offering free trials, one way customer success teams can do this is to personally take care of these new customers.
It’s important that customers feel welcome and understood by your product. This means providing a clear path for them to learn about your product and get involved in the process. You should also be friendly and accessible, making it easy for customers to contact you if they have questions or concerns at the early stages.
If a customer’s onboarding experience goes wrong, ensure you address the issue immediately to build trust and credibility.
Build an Effective Strategy for Reducing Churn
The best way to reduce customer churn is to build a customer success team that is dedicated to helping customers stay happy and pay their invoices. With an effective strategy for reducing churn, customer success managers can play a critical role in preventing customer subscription cancellations.
Customer success managers can start by creating an effective cancellation flow that provides them with extensive data on cancellation reasons. After that, each cancellation case should be dealt with personally by touching their pain points with the product and making a well-designed offer to keep them.
You can either offer them a free trial period or come up with custom solutions based on the cancellation reasons. Building a customer success strategy can reduce your churn rate and increase revenue over time.
Customer Success Manager Salary
Depending on the company, a customer success manager’s salary can vary. According to Glassdoor, the estimated total pay for a Customer Success Manager is $92,532 annually in the US.
But, for example, if you’re a Senior Customer Success Manager, you could earn as much as $124,386/yr. Or, if you work as a CS manager at Harvard Business School, you can receive $95,222/yr as your base pay.
How Juphy Can Help a Customer Success Manager with Its Features
As described, customer success and the role of a customer success manager play a crucial part in business success; therefore, it should be managed profoundly. That’s why you need a tool like Juphy to help you perform an effective customer success strategy as a customer success manager.
There are many features that help you to optimize your CS strategies;
Social Inbox
Customer success is all about communication, so a social inbox is so important to manage all customer conversations and relations effectively. In addition to the importance of the quality of the communication, speed and easiness also are game changer elements. With Juphy’s unified inbox, you can connect each communication channel to a single inbox and manage conversations from one unified dashboard. You can provide fast replies, mentions, DMs, and comments without switching between different platforms.
Team Collaboration
Customer success is a team play. You need a great customer success team as a CSM to enhance the quality of your strategy. Juphy allows you to add your team to your project and work in sync on customer services in real time.
Performance Reports
As one of the key responsibilities of a customer success manager, you need to track the effectiveness of your strategy and your team. Juphy provides insightful performance reports for you to check on your numbers, change your approach if needed, and provide a better customer experience.
You can start your 7-day free trial immediately without giving out any credit card information.
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