Has it ever occurred to you why some businesses manage to retain their customers like pros while others struggle in vain? Well, the answer to this apparently lies in someone we refer to as a customer success manager.
A customer success manager, or a CSM for short, is concerned with handling customer service and acting as a vital bridge between sales and support. A sales manager proactively works to address customer needs and keep customers engaged, which goes a long way toward reducing churn and helps unlock new revenue opportunities.
Customer success management is directly tied to an organization’s ability to retain customers as well as rates of cross-sells and up-sells. This makes it critical for the bottom line, competitiveness, and overall health of an organization.
In this article, we delve into what a CSM is and their role and responsibilities to establish how and why they act as a catalyst for business growth. The article will also introduce you to why our cutting-edge CS solution, ScaleSupport, is your perfect choice to streamline CSM services without hiring in-house.
What Is a Customer Success Manager?
A customer success manager is the one leading and managing a group of representatives who directly deal with the organization. Depending on how your organization is structured and its size, customer success managers generally report either to a senior manager or the top-most authority in Customer Support and Success.
The ever-growing demand for customer success can be gauged from the number of open Customer Success positions, which increased by 17 % from July to August in 2023 and currently stands at 4,346 open jobs.
CSM teams perform myriad duties, but the central focus of their work is to foster strong, lasting relationships with customers by offering customers maximum value from a company’s offerings or products. By doing so, his goal is to ensure that customers get their desired outcomes from a given product or service while presenting it as the go-to solution for their needs.
It goes beyond the reactive nature of traditional customer support and instead takes a proactive approach to cultivate loyal customers and retain them for the long term.
CSM: Bridging Sales and Customer Satisfaction
Customer success managers act as the first touch point between sales and customers, hence allowing a customer to smoothly transition from the initial transaction to continued support.
They guide customers towards the best that a company has to offer and thus help a company reach out to its target customers. They serve as educators to empower customers by explaining their product instead of prompting incessant inquiries.
A customer success manager isn’t merely concerned with hitting sales targets; they are rather dedicatedly to attending to customer needs and expectations throughout their journey to ensure they end up completely satisfied with the product.
In case an issue arises, a customer success manager doesn’t stay at the surface level but goes deep down to the heart of a problem and provides personalized support in tune with what the customer exactly wants out of a product.
Key Responsibilities of a Customer Success Manager
A CSM position is multi-faceted, but it is ultimately driven towards the biggest goal of their goal- a strong client relationship that yields dividends for the business. If you are wondering what does a customer success manager do, here is an overview of their key responsibilities.
1. Onboarding New Clients
- A customer success manager not only onboards a client but also gives them enough incentive to move towards product adoption. This includes providing them with the tools, resources, and knowledge to get acquainted with a product as well as set the tone for what customers come to expect from you down the line.
- They strive to provide a top-notch customer experience that makes a customer willing to engage and eventually purchase.
2. Educating Clients about Products
- A customer success manager is the source through which clients learn everything about a product, right from its features to how it can best be used and, finally, practical use cases. This is especially relevant if you have a complex product or service where success reps can proactively answer any questions that they may have on their minds.
- For example, they may work with marketing teams to create blogs or videos on how the product works and share them with customers. This way, they build a knowledge base around your product, which helps boost brand awareness to differentiate you from your competitors.
3. Monitor Customer Engagement and Satisfaction
- A customer success manager’s work speaks for itself. He keeps track of key performance indicators (KPIs) to demonstrate how far the customer has come down the pipeline from initial interest to the final purchase. He relies on success metrics like customer satisfaction and retention rates as proof that business goals have been achieved.
- One strategic move is to outsource customer support to deal with any repetitive queries while the customer success representatives are all in to diagnose problem areas and identify points that will bring success for your customers and, ultimately, for you.
4. Proactively Address Customer Concerns
- Customer success management is not simply content with selling, but comes to the rescue of customers right away before issues turn serious enough to disillusion them. This helps win over customer trust as the customer appreciates the time and effort being put into addressing their concerns.
- Customer Success managers engage with customers at different touchpoints and endeavour to make each interaction as rewarding as possible. They may communicate with sales teams to find out what pain points frequently come up so that the proactive and reactive sales efforts can be aligned
5. Formulate Strategies for Growth
- A client success manager is also a strategist who plans and executes strategies geared toward customer renewal while offering the highest possible satisfaction.
- They share the CSM sales strategy with customer service teams and guide them on what they are supposed to do individually and as a team.
- Finally, they analyze whether the customer success strategy turned out to be effective by analyzing customer feedback and retention rates.
Based on that, the strategy can be modified as your business and customer base grow. This serves to turn a user into a loyal customer, which paves the way for repeat purchases that help extend profit margins.
How a Customer Success Manager Supports Business Growth
Having explored what is a CSM, let’s now turn to how they drive business growth in an intensely competitive business environment.
Increased Retention Rates
It’s a fact that customers value personalized attention more than ever, and when combined with ongoing support, it encourages them to stay loyal to a brand. Customer success management engages the customers at all levels to ensure they remain committed while doing all they can to prevent them from shifting their loyalties. A Gartner study showed that the probability that a customer would stay with a company despite an opportunity to switch was 82% higher following a value-enhancing service interaction.
Magnify Upsell & Cross-Sell Opportunities
Customer success managers understand the dynamics of sales and exploit every given opportunity to maximize prospects for sales. Knowing customers’ needs all too well, they strategically move to convince customers to get a product update or other complementary services.
Since customer service teams are focused on forging relationships and not overtly selling, they have nurtured a level of trust that makes a recommendation sound more welcoming.
This is in stark contrast to the pitching efforts of sales teams that come across as too pushy or desperate. As per the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2022, 90% of customers are willing to spend more in exchange for personalized services.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
The margin for acquiring new customers is getting only thinner, which means that the only way to keep revenue flowing is to keep existing customers happy. Customer Success teams know what it takes to treat customers as VIPs and not randomly, implementing the highest standards of customer service.
A happy customer projects greater loyalty and may even become your biggest advocate. To put it in numbers, nearly 77% of these customers will go on to spread the word about their positive experiences with others. The more enthusiastic of these customers may go a step further and post it on social media, winning you free marketing like no other.
Reduced Support Overload
A CSM team helps take the burden off customer support teams so that they are not bombarded with questions, complaints, and requests through multiple channels like phone, email, live chat, and social media. Instead, it acts before customers raise issues by providing them with resources to educate and guide them toward the best way of using the product.
A customer success manager is also concerned with hiring, training, and motivating CS representatives on how to incorporate best practices to engage and retain customers.
It’s only natural for support teams to slack under constant pressure from seemingly unending questions, issues, and requests. Having a top customer support agency as your partner can ensure you are well-equipped to streamline customer interactions for enhanced customer satisfaction.
Iterative Insights through Feedback
A customer success sales team works through a two-way feedback loop. On the one hand, they gather customer feedback as to how the product can be improved and forward these insights to relevant teams to continually refine and improve the product. They also keep customers in the loop about changes they can expect to see in current or future products. This way, they play a key role in fuelling innovation for your business to help you stay ahead of the curve.
Benefits of Outsourcing Customer Success Management to ScaleSupport
Now that you understand why customer success management is indispensable for your business, the very next question for you is how to go about it. You have two options before you; you can either choose to hire yourself or take an off-handed approach and let a third party do the work for you. In case you choose to outsource customer success functions to a reliable Customer Success Management platform like Sales Support, here are the benefits for your business.
- Cost-Effective Solution
Hiring an in-house customer success manager is the traditional route, but it is a resource-intensive and arduous process. With Sales support, you can take advantage of broad-based and top-tier customer success talent at a low proportion of your hiring budget.
- Flexible Support Options
Businesses differ in terms of their goals, which is why flexibility lies at the heart of our customer success management solutions. We offer customized strategies to ensure that you can get the desired level of support in keeping with customer demand, so that you are always there for your customers. Our CSM system can easily integrate with your existing processes so that you start seeing results from the get-go.
- Industry Expertise
At ScaleSupport, we are backed up by a team of customer success managers who bring top-notch expertise and plenty of industry experience to ensure your customers receive nothing but the best guidance and support. Our team will act as an extension of your team, advancing your business goals and upholding your interests at all times.
- Scalable Growth Support
Business needs are forever changing, and with that, your customer success requirements evolve, too. Whether you are starting out or facing a growth spurt, our scalable services offer a seamless way to expand your customer success teams without getting bogged down by any logistical challenges that come with it.
Conclusion
Customer success management is indeed an asset for any business, especially those that crucially rely on customer service. Keeping customers satisfied is key to the success of your business, and a customer success manager can help you achieve that, getting rid of churn and opening avenues for revenue.
Including a customer success program can be a make-or-break factor in your customer service strategy to ensure your customers are treated the way they deserve.
By making customers feel supported every step of their journey, managing customer success lays the foundations for long-term relationships and seals their loyalty, which translates into sustainable growth for your business.
If you are seeking to tap into the advantages of customer success management without bearing the overhead of an in-house team, ScaleSupport is for you. Visit our website to explore what CSM services we have in store for you. You may also book a free consultation to discover how our CSM solutions can realize your vision of satisfied customers, to give your business the momentum it needs to thrive.
Dianne has extensive experience as a Content Writer, she creates engaging content that captivates readers and ranks well online. She stays on top of industry trends to keep her work fresh and impactful. She has a talent for turning complex ideas into relatable stories. When she’s not writing, you’ll probably find her with a crochet hook in hand or working on a fun craft project. She loves bringing creativity to life, whether it’s through words or handmade creations.
