4 Characteristics That Every Customer Success Manager Must Have

1. Fanatical Drive for Success
You need to wake up every day planning on how you will make a difference. It’s not a competition with others as much as with yourself. How do you best solve a problem or make a impactful change? There is no ego involved here just pure ambition to want to make things better than they were yesterday. And the more you can affect others the more they will want to do the same. This is precisely how great companies are built and powerful cultures formed to solve problems in new and interesting ways.

2. Measure and Manage
The old adage of you can’t manage what you can’t measure applies. However, in the customer success world you need to have more than metrics but a strategy of how to avoid problems before they arise. To be proactive and anticipate customer needs and avoid constant fire drills and reacting to problems like a game of whack a mole. KPI’s are there to provide you with visibility markers but they will not deliver a decision matrix or specific action for thinking ahead of alerts. Whether its time to resolution, NPS, social engagement or any number of other metrics make sure to always set a bar above the trend line and push through what is directly in front of you.

3. Calmness in the Face of Fire
Escalations are a constant threat but need to be viewed as an opportunity. Specifically, an opportunity to get to know a friction point with your product or service and to identify its root cause and how to associate solutions that will benefit many. There is nothing worse than panic during these moments and a loss of orientation that results in a temporary solution to an emerging or common problem. Composure is often gained from experience and balancing priorities to know how to separate the signal from the noise.

4. Ability to Engineer Experience
This is perhaps the most innovative aspect of what customer success managers do - they have the distinct ability to serve on the front line of customer engagement by providing an experience that represents their company brand and mission. It is often experience that can take a fairly routine product and make it stand out from the crowd. Customer experience can be engineered and despite the usual scripts there are plenty of new possibilities to keep your customers guessing. As an example, you can delight customer with a company persona that stands out while providing meaningful engagement. This should be a creative and fun process where you can mix in things like gamification and personas for your teams – success ninjas, sherpas, or superheroes that come to the rescue. When done well you would be amazed at the reactions.

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