Customer Success Manager (CSM) job description:
As a CSM (Customer Success Manager), your role is to maintain a good relationship and the satisfaction of your existing customers while developing the customer portfolio. Your ultimate end goal will be retaining clients. Privileged contact for customers on the solution, you are the trusted person to whom they can turn. Comfortable with business and digital subjects, you help your clients achieve their goals via products/services. You train them in the acquisition of new skills to allow them to be autonomous in certain subjects.
Additional Resource– What is a Customer Success Manager
Main missions of the Customer Success Manager (CSM)
Your first objective is customer satisfaction and loyalty. For that, you prioritize its objectives. You support the customer and maintain the relationship with practical cases that meet their business needs. You put forward your excellent interpersonal skills and your ability to solve problems to become their reference.
Additional Resource: Top 6 Focus Areas for a Customer Success Leader
You are also the interface between the client and your Marketing and Product teams. You, therefore, have an impact on the product roadmap to respond better and as quickly as possible to the needs of your customers. A good relationship with the Sales department in order to be able to sell new services will also be highly valued by your managers.
To improve your performance, you must constantly improve customer satisfaction and customer experience. To help you, you watch over your churn, the proportion of customers lost by your business over a given period. This will be your main KPI to follow and you are responsible for its value, the missions associated with your job are mainly oriented towards this objective. The work that a CSM does to yield more revenue and revenue goals can be another major mission for you.
Finally, you must always be a force for proposals on the tools, client-side as well as product side, and manage ad-hoc projects if there are seasonality and slack periods.
How to recruit the right Customer Success Manager (CSM)?
Ask questions upfront about customer satisfaction rates and repurchase numbers generated. This is the main role of CSM, so he must be able to present results to you.
Assess his ability to improve what already exists by asking him if he has ever written processes for a previous job.
Add a few questions about his ability to meet new customer requirements by asking him if he has ever written and structured customer service response management scenarios? If so, ask him or her to detail one of the scenarios from an old business experience.
To perfect your judgment, ask yourself if you appreciated his interpersonal skills, and his ability to answer your questions in a relevant way.
Finally, ask for references from his former clients to assess how well he was integrated into their teams, the relationship with his main contact, and the proper use of the CRM tool in his daily life.
Follow up to this section with Ten Interview Questions to Hire the best Customer Success Manager (CSM)
Customer Success Manager CSM Salary Trends 2022
Customer success salaries continue to grow as the industry matures and companies place greater emphasis on the expertise and responsibilities of these CS professionals. In recent years, CS professional compensation structures have tended to rely on revenue-generating activities, which will continue in 2022. The CS team is also becoming more and more responsible for achieving their sales goals. 78% of respondents in a CS survey say the team is responsible for achieving these goals. This is an increase of 34% from 2020. The CS team is tasked with generating revenue that impacts business revenue and improves product liability, including the introduction of features to reduce churn and increase renewals. As a result, over the past few years, compensation structures have focused on bonuses and other incentives such as stocks and equity options.
Compensation system
According to 68% of the customer success experts surveyed, the compensation structure included a bonus structure in addition to the base salary. There has been the addition of stock or stock options. 37% of respondents say they received these as part of their overall compensation structure. In private companies, Customer Success experts are further driving business growth by offering stock options, reflecting the understanding that a customer’s health and well-being depend on sales with that customer.
Partly due to the impact of the COVID19 pandemic, over the past year, there has been a shift to a bonus structure focused on account health and value provided, and how those factors drive sales… Customer Success professionals’ bonuses still emphasized the overall performance of the team and the company, but this year we saw an increase in bonuses for outcome delivery like NPS, feature adoption, and account health.
In addition, a 32% increase in respondents said that the impact on revenue (89%), such as account expansion and upsell, was an important part of bonus rewards.
Customer success manager (CSM)
According to this year’s survey data and payscale data, the average salary for customer success managers in 2021 is $94,000. However, the salary range for this position is $48,500-$170,000, with CSMs in major metropolitan areas of California and New York, and CSMs that have worked for large companies for more than 10 years. The average salary for this position has steadily increased over the past few years, and this trend is expected to continue as companies focus on adding value to their customers and expanding product adoption and referrals. Organizations recognize the importance of customer outcomes over traditional business outcomes and understand that this change requires the best talent available.
Salary range
$48,500 – $170,000
Median
$94K
Customer success operations
As customer success becomes more and more important to the enterprise, new titles are increasing. That’s why we’ve added salaries to many new roles this year, including customer success operations. This role is typically responsible for implementing CS strategies, forecasting sales, monitoring customer usage, building advocacy groups, and more. According to survey respondents, the average salary for CS operations is $85,000. The salary range for this position ranges from $70,000 to $90,000, reflecting the importance of the role to the CS team and the company.
Salary range
$70,500 – $90,000
Median
$85K
Customer success director
According to the customer success experts surveyed, the average salary of the customer success director in 2021 was $130,000. This is a slight increase from 2020 when average salaries were between $ 100,000 and $ 125,000. Interestingly, a post-pandemic survey in 2020 found that 64% of board members raised their salaries, a trend that seems to continue until 2021, increasing the value companies place in CS and leadership during uncertain times.
Salary range
$75,000-$250,000
Median
$130,000
Customer success manager (CSM)
In recent years, the title of Head of Customer Success has become increasingly popular in our annual compensation survey. According to survey respondents, the average salary for a customer success manager is $ 130,000. Due to the different sizes of companies surveyed, the salary range for this position is very wide. As a result, salaries range from $70,000 to $280,000.
Salary range
$70,000- $280,000
Median
$130,000
Vice President for Customer Success
The average salary for the Vice President of Customer Success in 2021 is $200,000. The salary range for this position was $130,000 – $300,000. In 2020, more than half (58%) of respondents said they earned more than $175,000, but only 25% were between $200,000, reflecting the steady rise in salaries in positions.
Salary range
$130,000- $300,000
Median
$200,000
Summary
As CS becomes more infused into organizations, increasing collaboration between CS and Marketing, Sales, and other teams will be necessary as these teams will be required to access and act on the customer data in the same way that the CS team is doing using digital technologies. We also expect that bonus structures will continue to be more tied to customer value, through factors like account health and customer advocacy. As digital data and solutions give CS professionals more access to insights and help with automating repetitive tasks, CSMs in turn have more time to work on those key activities that deepen value for the customer.
