Senior Customer Success Manager

Job Description

We are looking for a highly driven and motivated individual who is passionate about building strong relationships and providing a best-in-class customer experience. 

Our Customer Success Managers (CSM) consult on a spectrum of Customer Support/Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) solutions from the Zendesk SaaS suite with a wide array of customers. We ensure customers are optimized and scaling easily through impactful engagements, while driving customers’ business and technical value. Our priority is to understand our customer’s business, work collaboratively with them to create a Success Plan, and ultimately deliver measurable ROI and customer results using Zendesk.

CSMs align to a portfolio of customers within a specific region and are responsible for retention, minimizing churn/contraction risk while driving product adoption, and identifying expansion opportunities to then collaborate with Sales. This is done through proactively engaging with customers at specific points in their lifecycle, providing them experiences and recommendations based on their CX maturity. Alongside your teammates in Sales, Support, and Product Management, you ensure that customers are seeing results from Zendesk and will continue to stay and grow!

What You’ll Do

• Build and foster strong relationships with your portfolio of up to 35 customers to minimize churn and contraction and drive expansion by partnering with our customer's technical and business executive leadership team with post-sales implementation planning, proactively guiding customers' technical adoption journey, and enabling them to deliver innovation and demonstrable business value to their end business users.

• Develop a deep understanding of the customer's business and technical objectives, collaborating with them to build a strategic joint success plan with identified objectives, milestones, and measurable KPIs to achieve the outcomes.

• Develop and apply domain/technical knowledge of the Zendesk platform, our best practices, and customer insights to remove blockers and lead key resources, internally and externally, to proactively support customer's success plan.

• Engage regularly with customers based on our touchpoint framework (i.e. user shadowing, strategic discovery, executive business reviews, and roadmap presentations).

• Proactively analyze customer’s product usage data and take necessary actions to mitigate risk, improve product adoption, business value outcomes and reduce churn.

• Partner with customer-facing account teams and executives (Sales, Renewals, Advocacy, Professional Services, Product, Engineering, and partners) on overall platform success, to accelerate customer's time-to-value journey and to protect recurring renewal revenue and expand customer NRR (Net Retention Rate)

• Regularly assess, plan, and document your customer’s success journey with Zendesk via Gainsight.

• Mentor and coach team members based on prior experience and best practices. 

• Contribute to projects that impact all Zendesk customers (events, best practices, etc). 

• Willing and able to travel domestically up to 25%, and easily visit customers in the United States.

Who You Are

• Experienced in managing Commercial-level accounts.

• Possess an executive presence, especially when presenting to an executive audience and have the ability to hold and engage their attention in the room.

• A proven track record of planning for a portfolio of engagements, on-time deliveries, cross-group collaboration, and critical thinking is required. 

• Well-versed in software and subscription services with excellent customer, partner, and market orientation.

• Strong communication/presentation skills, as well as displaying strong leadership and confidence in all levels of customer engagement/situations.

• Ability to understand the business requirements and help customers with best practices and the right next action. 

• Ability to articulate business value to various stakeholders within customer organizations including IT and business leaders.

• Possess strong leadership and collaboration skills, and the ability to influence and inspire cross-functional teams including Sales, Renewals, and technical roles. 

• Functional knowledge of technology deployment applications and overall Enterprise architecture required, and familiarity with Customer Support/CX (industry and technology).

• Strong analytical skills, including experience with Looker, Tableau, or similar software, and experience turning data into insights to fuel your ideas.

• Self-starter who thrives in both collaborative and autonomous environments.

What You've Done

• 8+ years of relevant work experience in customer-facing Customer Success, Account Management, or strategic consulting roles. SaaS experience required.

• Experience in Product Management or technical/business consulting roles attributing to technical delivery management or/program management for large, complex and global strategic customers preferred.

• Track record of managing up to 35 customers. Have used CRM or Customer Success software such as SFDC and Gainsight to prioritize and manage accounts. 

• Experience working with multiple levels of customer stakeholders – technical admins, C-level executives, and procurement teams.

• Experience in a demanding role that requires strong leadership, committed priority management, and high emotional intelligence.

• Proven track record of identifying and collaborating on expansion opportunities and strategies with Sales and account teams.

• Proven ability to quickly grasp and distinctly explain technological and business concepts, including demonstrating SaaS functionality to customers. 

• Applied domain/technical knowledge of CX solutions, best practices, and customer insights to remove blockers and lead key resources, internally and externally, to proactively support customer's success plan. Zendesk knowledge is a bonus.

• High-level understanding of enterprise architecture principles and familiarity with the IT application landscape common amongst Enterprise companies.

• Completed Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent career experience.

The US annualized OTE (On Target Earnings) range for this position is $141,000.00-$211,000.00 with a pay mix of 70/30 (base/commission). This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. While this range reflects the minimum and maximum value for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations, the offer for the successful candidate for this position will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other factors such as work location. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only (or OTE for commissions based roles), and do not include bonus, benefits, or related incentives.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to [email protected] with your specific accommodation request.