A human gets 48.6 thoughts per minute and that’s our current reality. Our mind is like a monkey, jumping from one trail of thoughts to another. 95% of it is repetitive and 80% are negative thoughts. Imagine how much time it takes for a human to process a bad experience and swiftly move from one brand to another? There is a need for managing brand loyalty to the clients and that’s why you need a client success manager. Also called as a client service manager!
We are in the digital era of the internet world, like the speed of light is 3,00,000 km/s, the spread of news is striking! It matters what sort of an experience a client receives as it impacts their buying decision.
So those businesses that believe to offer customer satisfaction, are likely to have loyal customers, repeat purchases, higher customer retention rates, and buyers who try newer products.
Suggested Read: The Ultimate Guide to Customer Success Manager
Roles and responsibilities of a Client Success Manager.
Speaking of the roles and responsibilities of a client success manager, most importantly it includes;
Engaging in building relationships between clients and businesses.
The way of building relationships strengthens when the client success manager interprets and analyzes the information provided by the client so that the clients can rely on their suggestions. That’s an impressive tactic to depict your understanding of data and is a start for them to trust you with their business. The relationship eventually grows to strengthen with that push!
Create better customer experiences.
Bring the early value to their business that your product can achieve. Effective handling of the executions by making it to each milestone and offering the sense of achievement motivates them for self-actualization. Communication that is to the point and creates no chaos can create a good experience. All-in-all handling the experience from onboarding to make them an advocate of the brand is taken care of by the client success manager!
Actively engage in communicating with the customers.
The moment there is no engagement you don’t know what is going on with your clients. And hence keeping track of their journey, progresses, and misses needs touchpoints to ensure they are on good terms. This is more of an obvious thing to stay in contact with the clients to achieve their goals.
Suggested Read: Responsibilities of a Customer Success Manager
Resolve their issues.
Of course, another serious alert is when they are facing the issue, and is expected of the client success manager to help them ease it. To solve their issues, it is important for you to know their needs and why there is an issue. Also the know-how of the technicalities of the tools to get rid of it, so that they can resume the process of achieving success.
Handle any conflicts of interest.
It’s not just about solving the issues they are facing but also managing to ease any conflicts with the team to avoid them from churning. Who is free of conflicts in the business right? In fact, after handling the conflict, the job is to find a resolution.
Gather the feedback and make them brand advocates.
You’ve worked hard to get their interest and engage them in your product, solved their issues, and aided them in achieving success. Now it’s about collecting their valuable feedback for the company to make an improvisation of the product for the better and also help other folks to think of buying your product for the benefits they made.
In order to do so, you need to roll out NPS and customer satisfaction surveys and collect the reviews. For customer advocacy, write case studies, and ask for referrals!
Figure out the upselling opportunities and act upon customer retention.
Since it is important for the business to have repeat purchases, it is necessary to have a strategy in place. It helps to expand the customer portfolio with additional products to have increased customer lifetime value. It must include customer retention and also look for any opportunities of up-selling, with the data they have accumulated with constant engagement.
Customer success tool implementation for deriving insights, for the customer health checks, and a smooth onboarding process.
Nowadays clients need quality and to offer, it is a customer success tool that enables insights on data from all the data sources to make better decisions. It is now possible to see customer health scores that are customized to track metrics that resonate with their goals. And get alerts whenever there is a need to pay attention to their accounts. Also to run a smooth onboarding process that is clear with their goals and a plan with steps to achieve it effectively needs the client success manager to have training with the tool.
How to Become a Client Success Manager?
To be a client success manager all that matters is to have a bachelor’s degree. And experience in work which can be sales, accounting, marketing, business management, or business administration.
With 3-5 years of experience closely with roles that face customers directly are their preferences. Skills such as problem-solving, CRM software knowledge, and negotiation are good to have.
If you are just beginning your career and have no prior experience in any field, then start building the resume with an internship. If you have additionally taken courses such as marketing, sales, and account management, don’t forget to mention that!
Is client success manager a good role?
Frankly speaking, the challenges of taking up this role isn’t any less stressful. One can expect tougher times with clients having difficult conversations and sometimes handling them is just out of your league. Seeing your mails fully loaded is quite common and getting calls now and then can be frustrating!
But hold that thought! If working on helping customers to achieve success is your ulterior motive, you just exactly know how to face these challenges.
Coming to the market, all SaaS companies hire for these roles because either the company is customer-centric or wants to increase revenue. Hence they cater to hire client success managers to serve as a liaison between clients and the business.
Inference!
Since churn is a bigger challenge for these companies, they want to reduce it by understanding the clients better and by building good relationships. So, every SaaS firm needs a client success manager and the demand is increasing day by day.
