What does it take to be a great customer?
Customer success managers are the untold heroes of business. They are often overlooked and not valued for their contribution to the success of any business. They handle all customer service messages and calls, as well as the difficult ones. Then they work with the team to resolve them. They are the ones who get the most praise for things going well or when their team succeeds, but are often the first to be held responsible when things don’t go according to plan.
A company can hire a product manager to help them identify problems with their products. They are the ones who inform the company when their product isn’t performing as expected. They are the ones who can make or break a company.
Companies are now being challenged to do more, thanks to the success of Lean Start-up and webinars. Companies are constantly looking for ways to retain customers and keep them loyal as the sales cycle changes and customers become more sophisticated. What makes a customer success manager a successful one? Learn more about why you want to become a customer success manager, and then let us know your thoughts.
There has been much written about the importance of customer service and the sales process. But, we rarely hear about the crucial role of a customer success manager.
Let’s start by clearing the air with some terminology.
What is Customer Satisfaction?
Customer success refers to the ability to ensure that customers understand, absorb and feel the value of your products or services throughout their relationship. Customer success teams aim to improve customer experience to retain customers, decrease churn and increase customer loyalty.
What is a Customer Success Manager?
Customer success management ensures that your customers fully understand, absorb, feel, and value your product or service during their relationship with you.
What role does a customer success manger play?
Once you have settled on a contract, your customer success manager (sometimes called a client success manger) begins to work with customers. They make sure that customers are familiar with the product and have all the information they need to use it. This position acts as a liaison between customer service and sales.
Customer service managers are not there to sell products or provide technical support. They ensure the customer is happy with the purchase, before, during, and after the product’s life.
This position has been around for a decade, but it continues to grow at 34% per year. This is due to businesses’ increasing use of subscription- and consumption-based services like SaaS and cloud.
These “recurring-revenue” models are more focused on customer happiness, repeat sales, and low churn rates. This goal can only be achieved by a customer success manager.
Below is a typical sale-to-purchase path, as well as the essential responsibilities of a customer success manager:
Customer success manager pre-sales support
Prospect-to-customer starts with a salesperson, and ends with customer support or customer care staff. This journey is led by a customer success manager who acts as a facilitator, helping customers through the sales process and transitioning them to support.
- In this article, I will explain the role of a customer success manager, how they fit in to the prospect-to-customer selling cycle, and why they are so important.
- The Customer Success Manager is responsible for the pre-sale stage.
- The customer success manager is responsible for showing value to clients and assisting with sales to demonstrate proof of concept.
Customer success managers are not just customer service representatives. Customer success managers are not expected to answer technical questions and assist customers with configuring their software. Instead, they must help customers understand the capabilities of their product.
Excellent customer success managers are also crucial in assisting sales teams in closing transactions with complicated or difficult-to-demonstrate needs. As a bargaining tool or value-added service, salespeople can use the services of customer success managers to close sales.
A customer success manager helps to build a positive image of the organization’s assistance during the pre-sales stage. As the single point of contact, the customer success manager is responsible for the prospect’s initial perception of the level of assistance available from the organization.
Every opportunity should be assigned to a customer service manager in an ideal world. However, this is not always possible.
