What is a Customer Success Associate? How Do You Become One?

Similar to customer support, customer success associates work directly with customers to ensure they are satisfied with a company’s products and services. However, they also focus on customer retention and seek to deepen relationships with clients. Since customer success is a new area for professionals to consider, employers hire based on soft skills pertaining to clear communication, problem solving, and leadership.

By Timothy Mably

Customer success has become a priority for many companies in recent years, leading to opportunities for professionals from a wide range of backgrounds. Customer success associates are often employed by tech companies , ensuring that business benefits promised in sales cycles are accessible to customers.?

Customer success initiatives started in Silicon Valley and expanded with the rise of software. Instead of requiring customers to own the software and conduct upgrades, customer success provides them with software from their servers.?

Responsibilities of Customer Success Associates

Associates are also responsible for ensuring that customers are actively utilizing the subscriptions they have. They are the people who customers interact with, and effectively become the face of the company for many. Their job involves customer support, account management, and general professional services.

Author of The Membership Economy and The Forever Transaction, Robbie Kellman Baxter , explains that customer success associates focus on improving three key metrics: customer retention, customer lifetime value, and customer satisfaction, which accounts for things such as net promoter scores (NPS). NPS are generally used as a metric for market research derived from a survey asking whether customers would recommend a company or a product to someone they know.

She elaborates on how customer service associates can impact these metrics. “They help to onboard new customers, showing them how to implement new products and services and to get the most value out of what they’ve already paid for. They track customer behavior, noticing and checking in if customers seem unengaged. They solve problems. They share best practices. They inform customers of new products and features that might enhance customer experience.”

Customer success associates primarily focus on customer satisfaction, representing the company. A team of problem solvers who aim to benefit customers can have a big impact on a brand’s reputation.

Executive vice president and chief customer officer at Higher Logic, Jay Nathan , explains how customer success impacts a company’s reputation. He says, “Successful customers are everything because they are the social proof that a technology provider can do what it claims in its marketing and sales efforts.”

Apart from ensuring customers remain loyal to a company, customer success associates are tasked with recruiting successful customers to become public advocates.

Qualifying for Customer Success

Since it’s a fairly new field and customer success continues to rapidly evolve, companies rarely hire people who have done it in the past. As customer success is expanding after many professionals graduated from school, they don’t necessarily bring a relevant degree to the table. For that reason, employers prioritize an applicant’s transferable skills over academic qualifications or previous professional roles.

Nathan describes his own career path as “a goat path, long, and winding.” He says, ”There are many avenues to enter a customer success career path. Often, starting in customer support, implementation, onboarding, or account management and sales development can be good entry points into SaaS and customer success.”

Managers in customer success are largely consultative roles, so it can be helpful for them to have some professional experience within an industry. Nathan says, “The learning curve in this scenario is learning the business processes of a software company which can be quite different depending on what industry one comes from.”

Customer support to customer success is one of the few smooth transitions that professionals can make, as they are used to problems raised by customers in one-on-one settings. However, customer success also requires skills in optimizing customer results, similar to a salesperson.

Customer Success Skills

Customer success is composed mainly of problem solving and consulting, which involve reactive and proactive skills. Customer support focuses on closing tickets as soon as possible, which is different from a customer success associate’s aim to maximize engagement and retain customers .

Nathan says, “Customer success associates are marketers who love working directly with customers and can be effective because they see patterns and can effectively develop communications programs and materials that anticipate caller needs and improve the experience across entire segments.”

He recommends that if you are in marketing , but desire a direct line of communication with customers, customer success can provide the missing piece. Whereas marketing attempts to create connections from a distance, customer success is a hands-on approach to fulfilling needs and establishing a relationship.

Professionals from a wide range of industries likely qualify for customer success roles, as primary transferable skills such as problem solving and communication are common. Necessary skills are largely commercial and consultative, making a variety of professional experiences relevant for a position.?

Other relevant skills include strong communication , leadership , and executive networking . Apart from general transferable skills, customer success associates can learn from their specific company’s values. A strong customer success associate focuses on clear communication while understanding their individual company’s products and services.

Nathan recounts his professional experiences in marketing , sales , finance , HR , customer experience, product, and engineering , which all informed his role in customer success. Having experience in just one of his previous jobs can be greatly beneficial for a customer success associate.

Kellman Baxter says, “Someone coming from sales might still have a transactional and revenue orientation, pushing for more revenue and being less interested in making the customer happy.” A salesperson also knows how to build rapport and deepen relationships over time, which isn’t usually a part of a customer support person’s role.

Ultimately, customer success is an amalgamation of multiple roles, which provides an associate with consistent new learning experiences on the job. Combining the relational aspects of a salesperson with the attentiveness of customer support, a customer success associate ensures the satisfaction of customers with the company’s reputation in mind.

Top Takeaways

What is customer success and how can you pursue work in the field?

• Customer success associates are responsible for ensuring that customers are actively utilizing the subscriptions they have.
• They focus on customer retention, customer lifetime value, and customer satisfaction, which accounts for things such as NPS scores.
• A team of problem solvers who aim to benefit customers can have a big impact on a brand’s reputation.
• Customer support focuses on closing tickets as soon as possible, which is different from a customer success associate’s aim to maximize engagement and retain customers.
• Professionals from a wide range of industries likely qualify for customer success roles, as primary transferable skills such as problem solving and communication are common. Necessary skills are largely commercial and consultative, making a variety of professional experiences relevant to a position.