When you are good at managing your customers, your company sales increase along with the customer base. The progress of your firm relies on the satisfaction of your client’s. You must fulfil their requirements while meeting the company’s goals. The relationship of your customer with your business is of great value. Your employees carefully create it. Also, it determines the growth of your company in future and the profits it will be making in the time to come.
Role of customer success manager
The majority of firms are assigning the responsibility of maintaining professional ties with the customers to the Customer Success Manager. The CSM or Customer Success Manager plays an essential role in increasing the number of your customers. Since they must be by the side of clients and give them valuable feedback when they decide to purchase the products or services, they closely stay in touch with the client from the moment they discover your company until they make a purchase.
This association doesn’t end here, and they keep on guiding the customers after the sales process by staying in touch with them and informing them about how the product or service can improve their life. Moreover, they guide clients about any new products launched by the company that can benefit them.
Before we describe some of the key responsibilities of the Customer Success Manager, let us give you a brief overview of their role.
Who is a CSM or Customer Support Manager?
The company’s top management assigns the responsibility of managing the customers when they have made the deal to the Customer Success Manager.They start by helping the clients learn about the products, so they become experts at using them. They fill the gap between the support and sales departments.
Their duty doesn’t revolve around providing technical assistance or making sales. Instead, it ensures that the client is satisfied with the product and owns everything that comes as a necessary part of the package.
What are the Qualities of a Good Customer Success Manager?
CSM should have great managerial, interpersonal, coordinating, planning and communication skills. Customer success managers can learn them over time. But the actual effectiveness of CSM relies on their soft skills.
In CSM, a tendency for building rapid relationships is in high demand. The clients like to trust that your services are of the best quality and you have expert market knowledge. They also want to take comfort in the fact that you know what they require. Moreover, they further want to trust that your suggestions will serve them the best. So the job of CSM does not involve making only superficial customer ties. They must enjoy creating and continuing relationships. A professional CSM may not pretend because the customers will find it out, and that won’t inspire them into repeating business with you again.
Empathy is one of the skills that an effective customer success manager must have. They must be competent enough to connect with the customers when they are doing well or having a difficult time. A CSM creates a bond that lasts over a long time. Here are eleven key responsibilities that should be in a capable CSM.
- Enhance Customer Satisfaction by Creating Valuable Ties.
- Improve Customer Training.
- Assess and Examine Customer Requirements.
- Create Trust and Clarity in Dealings with Clients.
- Maintain a Relationship with New Clients.
- Work as a Customer Assistant.
- Motivates Clients to Upgrade their Companies Products and Services.
- Improve Customer Loyalty.
- Maintain a strategic view of the complete support process.
- Brand and product marketing
- Actively find solutions to client’s issues
Top 11 Qualities of a Good Customer Success Manager
Enhance Customer Satisfaction By Creating Valuable Ties:
The customer success managers develop engagement tactics with the customers to create valuable ties by keeping them satisfied. Then, they provide suitable products and services, training and client assistance services to achieve that. So, CSMs must make and maintain healthy relationships with the clients for years to come.
One of their jobs is to develop trustable relationships with the industry’s key players to ensure that the clients obtain the required assistance.
Improve Customer Training:
It is necessary to understand the effect the training creates on the growth of the business as a CSM must guide customers about how they can utilise the products to the best of their ability. The training to improve the customer experience consists of CSMs contacting the customers and carrying out video conferences with them to facilitate them with custom methods on how to utilise the product for making their lives easier.
That method also ensures clients know about their product’s learning resources that the manufacturers are providing. And they have the appropriate components for gaining maximum benefit from it.
Assess and Examine Customer Requirements:
The customer success manager advertises the company’s success by frequently inspecting how its products are fulfilling the customer’s requirements and which aspects of the product should be improved.
This method works by collecting customer reviews about the product, studying them carefully and gaining a better perspective of customer experience. The customer success manager should also assess whether the documentation was user-friendly and if it was easy to utilise the product after reading it.
Creates Trust and Clarity in Dealings with Clients:
To provide beneficial services, a CSM must create friendly relationships with the customers. So clarity in dealings with the clients is necessary. The clients should be so close to the customer success manager that they should easily start an insightful conversation with them. That can create an opportunity for the CSM to guide them about the suitable product that brings value to them regardless of the revenue generated by the company.
To take on this responsibility, the CSM must maintain plenty of coordination with the clients. The customer success manager’s duties consist of aligning the corporate culture, services of the supervisors and customer assistants so that the clients can make the most out of the product and services. With this approach, the CSM can provide great value to the clients and creates a network that offers perks to the customers and the company.
Maintains A Relationship With New Clients:
Maintaining a relationship with customers by making them a part of their client base is one of the necessary duties of the CSM. Moreover, it is essential to guide the customers about effectively utilising the products and inform them about which features they should focus on for learning. Also, CSM should tell them about the new and upcoming projects of the company so they can make the most of what you are offering to them. That way they will become skilful in using the products. By ensuring that CSM is carrying out this responsibility competently, they can play an excellent role in boosting customer and company success.
With this approach, the customers will save time by effectively using the products and meeting their goals. A good CSM focuses on teaching those features of their company’s product that are relevant to the customers instead of guiding them about everything. That makes sure that their clients are getting the value from the product they had been expecting. So they can start gaining benefits from it and understand its necessity.
Works As A Customer Assistant:
A CSM is a client’s assistant. They have to make sure that there is a fast response to customer feedback. They are the representatives of the customers in any company. Their biggest responsibility is to act as a broker who finds a middle ground between the client’s request and the company’s objectives.
The client’s suggestion may clash with another client’s request or with the company’s strategies for the product. So the CSM’s best tactic is to align the customer’s demands with the company’s objectives.
Motivates Clients To Upgrade Their Companies Products And Services:
Because of having insights into the client’s experiences, CSMs play an important role in motivating customers to gain better packages of the products. They can even encourage them to utilise the other products by the company. With a great understanding of the client’s requirements, they can find possibilities to sell additional products to the customers. They can also inform the clients about these prospects and offer them the exact items they are searching for.
The CSM is also responsible for resolving client’s complaints. So they should be able to adapt to any situation and take appropriate measures for unexpected scenarios. By keeping these responsibilities of CSM in view, it will be safe to assume that they are an essential part of any organisation. They stay updated with the latest news and information in the industry to provide suitable solutions to the customers.
Improve Customer Loyalty:
The CSM has to generate customer loyalty, so they stay connected with the company. That is why they must carry out product or service renewals with the customer from time to time. Moreover, they should keep a record of the client’s product or service ending dates and stay updated with them for renewing their subscriptions. By tracking the product’s subscription duration for every customer, the CSM ensures that the customer repeats business with the company.
A good customer success manager learns from setbacks in retaining a customer. They find out why the customer is not satisfied with the products or services. And keep a large number of clients connected to the company. Also, a customer success manager provides insights about what’s new in the area of their client’s interest.
Maintain A Strategic View Of The Complete Support Process:
Customer success managers deal with the several stages of the client’s lifestyle. So they have an in-depth understanding of what they want. Service representatives might know the usual client issues, but they only have a closer view of the whole process. The customer success manager has a bigger perspective of the entire situation. They can analyse which issues impact the multiple customers and predict how those trends are responsible for their future retention.
The CSMs can also help the company decide the upcoming product updates and any required changes. In addition, they can serve the customers by voicing the customer’s desires to the company’s top management.
For example, a CSM finds out that many customers are requesting a beneficial product upgrade. So they talk to the product managers about it. The product managers also agree with them and carry out the upgrade. That makes the customers happy. It is also a win-win situation for the company and clients.
The high-level perspective facilitates the CSMs in finding out the necessary setbacks, finding a solution for them, and converting them into savings for the customers and the companies.
Brand and Product Marketing:
CSMs create enthusiasm for new and upcoming products by informing the clients about them regularly. When the company launches new products in the market, the customer success managers offer demos and tutorials. When customers want to add new products to their package, the success manager assists them.
The customer success managers can present the opportunities to the clients practically because they have a great understanding of their needs, and they gain their trust. In addition, these opportunities can lead to better product or service positioning and growth strategies.
They also assist the new customers in the transition process when they want to switch from a product from another company to the product of the CSMs company. That is highly essential when onboarding new clients. Moreover, they closely guide the customers about the products to ensure that the transition occurs smoothly.
Actively Find Solutions To Client’s Issues
CSM works closely with their client’s businesses and searches for ways to offer solutions to their issues. They must spot the issues at the right time to keep the clients content. They monitor their client’s satisfaction levels closely to make sure they are always happy with the company’s products and services. Also, in this way, they can provide solutions at the right time.
CSMs communicate with their customer’s on a monthly or weekly basis and enquire them with a set of questions to measure their satisfaction. They can also utilise this feedback with the analytical data. Like how often the customers are signing into the company’s software to determine their happiness level.
Top 3 Traits of a Competent Customer Success Manager
Project Management Capabilities: It will be correct to say that the CSM has to spend his time serving two teams, namely sales and client support. They must understand how to coordinate the projects between the two departments and deliver specific tasks to the appropriate employees in the company.
Proactive Attitude: A CSM must work with a proactive attitude. For example, the CSMs should create a feedback system for the support team when they find out that the number of client complaints increases for a particular product. If the company postpones resolving the issues, the customers will start looking elsewhere for the services.
Emotional Intelligence: The CSMs must have this attribute in them. Since they have to work with individuals, they must be empathetic to the clients. Being a manager, they must understand the point of view of the company’s employees and clients. A friendly manager can engage more customers and also make long relationships with them.
Switch To VoIP And Improve Customer Success
Switching to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can significantly enhance customer success by providing a more efficient and flexible communication infrastructure. VoIP enables businesses to streamline customer interactions through features like call routing, automatic call distribution, and interactive voice response systems, ensuring that calls are promptly directed to the correct department or representative. With advanced call analytics and monitoring capabilities, businesses can gain insights into customer interactions, allowing for better service optimization and training. Additionally, VoIP facilitates integrating customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enabling seamless access to customer data during calls.
The flexibility of VoIP also supports multi-channel communication, including voice, video, and messaging, creating a more personalized and responsive customer experience. The switch to VoIP empowers businesses to enhance communication efficiency, gather valuable customer insights, and ultimately contribute to a more prosperous and customer-centric operation.
Conclusion
The customer success manager’s role is crucial to the business’s success because they can strengthen its relationship with the clients. So, as a rule, any company wanting to stay ahead of the competition must hire a CSM who has the appropriate skills. The customer success manager assists the company in finding new clients, keeping the existing ones, and improving sales. As a result, the sales and increase in company’s profits rely on the CSM effectiveness in doing their job.
