What Makes a Great Customer Success Manager in a SaaS-Driven World?

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As we’ve talked about in the past few articles, customer success is about more than just having a support staff ready and waiting to react to customer issues as they come in. It’s about intrinsically linking the success of your entire organization with the people you’ve dedicated yourself to serving. It’s about more than just making sure that someone knows how to use your product – it’s about positively impacting their lives and going out of your way to do so. It’s about doing everything in your power to proactively guarantee that your customers achieve their desired outcome every time, all the time, no exceptions.

Based on that, one of the most important things for you to understand is that behind every great customer success program is an equally great customer success manager – particularly in the SaaS-driven world that we’re now living in.

What is a Customer Success Manager?

A large part of exceptional customer success comes with the acknowledgment that everyone and everything are different. If you took a look at your closest competitor, you’d probably be looking at a very different organization from your own – even though you’re technically trying to do the same thing. Your customers are also very different and understanding this and supporting it is the ultimate key to triumph in this regard.

The role of the customer success manager is similar in that there is no “one size fits all” definition. For some companies, it will be the person who oversees projects and larger customer outreach efforts. For others, it will be someone tasked with overseeing and managing ongoing customer relationships. For many, it will be a bit of both at the same time.

While there is no “one right” definition of this position in general, there IS one in the context of your company and your audience. There are also a number of essential qualities that they all share.

What Makes a Customer Success Manager GREAT?

A great customer success manager in a SaaS environment is an advocate for the customer first and foremost. They’re the people responsible for both identifying and quantifying what “success” means in terms of your business and then communicating that information to drive product sales.

They’re also the people responsible for making sure that your company is involved in the ENTIRE customer lifecycle, from post-contract through the duration of their subscription period and beyond.

But more than anything, a great customer success manager is the one who can see the bigger picture. The one who makes sure that your organization is always moving forward at all times and that customer experiences are getting better at every opportunity. They work with many different areas of a company, developing critical processes to identify at-risk customers and then to establish successful account management routines.

They don’t just establish deployment goals and success factors – they then develop the plan required to carry them out successfully. They’re the ones working long hours conducting “well being” status calls, providing a personalized level of care and attention to detail that many customers will not have experienced before. They’re the ones that know product usage like the backs of their hands in an effort to keep customer churn at the healthiest level possible.

But more than anything, a great customer service manager in today’s SaaS world understands that you can always be doing better. That you should never stop pushing yourself. That there is always a step that you can take to make every customer interaction just a little bit brighter – be it through surveys, interviews, focus groups and more – and who will never stop working to keep that customer base not just satisfied but successful at all times.

You can read this and other customer success, social collaboration and cloud productivity thoughts on our blog. If you'd like to chat more about these topics directly, feel free to shoot me an inbox!