Manager, Customer Success

Introduction

The Manager, Customer Success is a key part of the Customer Success team, responsible for driving strategic objectives and ensuring operational excellence through the leadership of a regional team of 4–5 Customer Success Managers. Each CSM owns the full customer lifecycle - from onboarding through retention, renewals, and commercial conversations - and your role is to enable their success.

Rather than managing accounts directly, the Manager, Customer Success focuses exclusively on leading, coaching, and developing the team. You will be the first line of support for escalations, ensuring CSMs have the guidance and resources they need to manage complex customer situations. You’ll also work closely with Sales and Services leaders to make sure your team is aligned and positioned to deliver on customer outcomes, renewals, and growth in the region.

The Manager, Customer Success is the customer's advocate and is focused on key metrics of success, including customer satisfaction, retention, and identifying new opportunities to expand our relationships with our customers and partners. The Manager, Customer Success is an expert of our products and technology, experimentation strategy, and on growing a culture of experimentation. By relying on past experience, business acumen, and keen project management skills, the Manager, Customer Success is the driving force that enables our customers to build a highly valuable digital program.

The Manager, Customer Success is responsible for a regular cadence of team meetings, organizing key enablement exercises, driving higher business acumen and maturity of the team, supporting professional development for each direct report, and a process to flag and support red accounts, and renewal rate forecasting.

Lastly, the Manager, Customer Success will serve as the liaison between the customer and Optimizely – facilitating collaboration with Product, Engineering, Sales, Professional Services and others to be the voice of the customer within Optimizely.

Job Responsibilities

· In partnership with Account Executives, own the overall relationship with assigned clients in a blended portfolio of strategic customers, focusing on: growing adoption and ensuring retention, expansion and satisfaction.

· Work with direct reports to guide as well as directly with customers to build and execute on a success plan that establishes critical goals and key performance indicators for their digital program

· Ensure customers adopt best practices for both running their digital program and in using Optimizely's platform

· Implement and ensuring a ‘white glove’ service for our customers

· Address risks of client churn with senior management and work through churn risks with team members

· Introduce new products and services to our customers

· Lead and participate in the creation of strategies that drive product adoption, value realization, and delight our customers throughout the duration of the customer lifecycle

· Customer relationship and executive stakeholder management (to C-level)

· Regularly shares expertise and organizes trainings with the team to support continuous learning and improvement

· Ability to analyze data, discover compelling insights and develop action plans to achieve goals

· Manage customers through the full customer lifecycle, from initial on-boarding, scoping to successful maturity and growth. Guide team members in this process.

· Developing and maintaining a customer success management plan, both for themselves and for the wider team, executes against that plan

· Leading and directing customers, through building strong relationships and creating the conditions and opportunities to up-sell our company’s services and additional products

· Drive excellent customer satisfaction by understanding and over-delivering against Customer expectations

· Represent the Customer Success team at client facing meetings, events and internal meetings

· Ability to report on team performance, conduct plans to improve performance and capabilities when needed

· Maintaining customer success targets through contract renewals, growth and lead generation

· Full management of the customer renewal process

· Maintaining and innovating the use of CRM and CSM tools to record customer information and to track KPI’s. Being able to report back to manager on the region’s performance.

· Maintaining outstanding levels of client retention

· Conducting customer presentations to educate customers on how Optimizely will provide added value and/or drive business value

· Collaboratively work effectively with and across other departments, especially the sales team, partner team and marketing team in the region

· Maintain an active course of self-development in Optimizely & Industry developments

· Travel to customer locations when necessary

Knowledge and Experience

· Experience leading a team of customer success managers

· An innate drive for customer success and a strong commercial awareness

· Strong leadership capabilities at the group management level

· Highly driven with strong desire to achieve top results and break through barriers, determined to adapt quickly and comfortable with some ambiguity

· Strong conflict management and conflict resolution skills

· A passion for people, able to use your initiative and willing to go the extra mile

· Have a “Can Do” attitude

· Strong customer facing skills, able to pro-actively manage customer expectations, recognize customer needs and adapt company capabilities to customer’s requirements

· Are curious and have a deep desire to continuously improve and learn, with proven capacity to quickly absorb new concepts and technologies, preferably hands-on.

· Strong technical, analytical, and problem-solving skills. Ability to tie business problems to technical solutions and understand technology value propositions.

· Comfortable leading presentations and demos of our platform to large groups, both technical and non-technical. In-person and virtually.

· Track record of achieving targets in a solutions environment

· Excellent written and verbal communication skills

· Ability to work well under pressure, while retaining focus and composure

· Ability to communicate technical/ business issues and solutions clearly and confidently

· Ability to understand, communicate and interpret best practice digital marketing techniques

· Experience of delivering strategies and plans

· Confident; self-motivated and driven to achieve

· Ability to develop customer trust, grow accounts and nurture the talented team around you is key

· Energetic, lively and have an engaging personality and enjoy working in a team environment

· The tenacity to develop and educate existing customers on the company philosophy and product offering

· Ability to work autonomously negotiating long term relationships

· Experience with A/B testing/Experimentation and statistical methodologies is a plus

· Ability to use Optimizely is a plus

· Ability to travel up to 20% of the time to visit customers

Education

Bachelor's degree

Competencies