Expert Customer Success Manager

Job description

The Expert Customer Success Manager handles high-value or complex customer accounts, providing strategic guidance and solutions to enhance customer success. This role requires strong customer facing and leadership skills and the ability to create tailored strategies to improve customer outcomes.

Account Ownership & Lifecycle Management:

• Manage high-value or complex customer accounts, creating tailored success plans aligned to business goals.
• Drive strategic engagements, renewal planning, and account expansion.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Lead collaboration across Sales, Marketing, Product, Professional Services, and Support for high-impact accounts.
• Contribute to cross-functional planning for product adoption, account strategy, and customer communications.

Customer Advocacy & Retention:

• Proactively manage customer health and retention by identifying emerging risks, influencing renewal strategy, and driving corrective action.
• Serve as a strong customer advocate and trusted advisor, translating customer needs into clear internal priorities while guiding customers toward measurable value realization.

Process Improvement & Data Use:

• Leverage customer data and health indicators to proactively manage engagement and retention, translating insights into actionable improvements to customer success processes.

Strategic Customer Engagement:

• Plan and execute strategic engagement cadences across assigned accounts, adjusting frequency and format based on customer lifecycle stage and health signals.

Stakeholder Alignment:

• Engages independently with internal and external parties to support customer needs.
• Coordinates multi-party communication and ensures clear understanding of customer’s requirements, and ensures alignment between internal teams and external stakeholders.
• Manages complex interactions with minimal guidance and resolves routine cross-organizational blockers to maintain smooth customer execution.

Industry Acumen & Product Expertise:

• Maintains solid working knowledge of customer industry trends, typical use cases, and product capabilities relevant to assigned accounts.
• Applies this understanding to support day-to-day customer interactions, identify basic risks/opportunities, and contextualize customer questions or requirements.

Technical

Competencies:

• Microsoft 365: Expertise in Microsoft 365; demonstrated ability to build executive-ready deliverables, design account planning templates in Excel, and leverage Teams/SharePoint to orchestrate multi-stakeholder collaboration across internal and customer organizations.
• Salesforce: Expert-level Salesforce proficiency including the ability to build custom reports and dashboards, interpret pipeline and renewal data, manage opportunity tracking, and leverage CRM insights to inform proactive customer engagement strategies.
• Power BI: Proficient use of Power BI to analyze customer utilization, engagement, and health trends. Ability to translate data insights into clear, actionable recommendations for internal teams and customer discussions.
• Clari: Expert-level Clari proficiency; demonstrated ability to build and interpret custom forecast views, analyze historical accuracy trends, identify revenue risk patterns across accounts, and use Clari insights to drive strategic conversations in pipeline and renewal reviews.
• AI Tools (e.g., CoPilot): Demonstrates proficient and consistent use of AI tools to enhance customer account management, including synthesizing account, usage, and engagement data into actionable insights; improving the quality and efficiency of customer communications; and informing meeting preparation and renewal planning.
• Escalation Management: Proven experience managing escalations for complex customer accounts and leads internal coordination across Support, Product, and Engineering. Demonstrated ability to proactively identify when emerging technical issues may become production-impacting, initiate the appropriate escalation process, and maintain clear, confident communication with customer stakeholders throughout the incident lifecycle.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Proficiency in analyzing customer data and making data-driven decisions. Comfortable navigating data across various mediums and tools: retrieving information from multiple sources, interpreting trends, extracting actionable insights, and building structured action plans from those insights. Uses data to proactively identify risk, uncover opportunity, and substantiate strategic recommendations to both customers and internal stakeholders.
• Communication: Advanced communication skills with a proven ability to manage complex customer expectations and deliver difficult feedback with clarity, empathy, and confidence. Demonstrated experience handling challenging customer situations including misaligned expectations, dissatisfaction, and escalated concerns and can articulate specific examples of driving those interactions to constructive resolution while preserving the customer…