What is a Customer Success Manager?

when i'm getting introduced to the customer and as i'm forming the relationship with them the closer i am to them they'll see me on the same page the more they'll trust me as a csm my customer success friends eric ezips here for csm practice the customer success consulting firm today with me i have saqib jameel customer success manager at trapeze group all the way back in canada he's been a customer success manager for three years at trapeze group and today he's going to share with you his best practices and how does a day in a customer success manager looks like before we start i'd like to remind everyone subscribe to our youtube channel for all the great videos that we produce on customer success so tell me about what you do where do you work sure so i work as a customer success manager at this company called trapeze trapeze makes transit software i live here in toronto you know we have ttc for instance in any public transit you ride they would be the ones who would be using trapeze's applications hardware software both of them and as a customer success manager my job is to ensure two things number one a customer remains a customer this means that they continually see value in our applications you know whatever we're providing them there you know their business use cases are fulfilled and they continue purchasing getting more and more value to fulfill additional business use cases how do you do that tell me about how your day and your life looks like so as a csm whenever i come into work and i have to work on three core functions that the csm is supposed to do number one retention i have to ensure that the customer remains a customer all right any risks any concerns anything that they want someone at trapeze to pay attention to i have to take ownership of that and have to ensure that they are retrieving the returns from those their their risks their concerns are at rest all right secondly i work on adoption so adoption is a very important aspect of a csm in the sense that i as a csm have to see how the customer is utilizing the software that we have provided them how well they're using and how well can they use it further and i as their csm have to ensure that i give them the guidance ensure that they are utilizing we all work together i and the customer we work together to ensure that the customer is utilizing the application the software or the hardware in a better way just so they can extract better value from it finally it comes to expansion you know when we talk about usage i have to also see that the customer has invested in this product of ours what other business functions are they doing and how we as a vendor can help fulfill those use cases in a better manner how can we increase their efficiency their productivity by providing some additional value great some new customer success managers asked me you know when they go on an interview given all that and now coming from the perspective someone has been doing customer success management for a while what would you advise them to ask as part of the interview or in their first day of the job as a csm i i feel one of the primary things that is relevant and that is something that a csm while they're going through the interview process as well as once they get hired and they start on their job is to see what product are they working for what is the application doing and how is it actually translating into business value for the customer all right even during the interview say you're interviewing for a company like salesforce for instance right salesforce is a crm platform you'd want to see how sales forces customers are utilizing salesforce in their business operations and extracting key value from it and as a csm who is you know getting on board in salesforce for instance you would have to understand the product all right you would have to understand the nitty gritties of that and again translate into business use cases tell me from your own story the first month from the job when you just got this job what have you done that really made a difference for you in my case when i got on board i have been given a set of customers before i connected with them i wanted to understand how they are using the application all right how the recent relationship history has been how we have treated them as a customer how your company has treated them as a customer and what are their grievances what are the things that make them happy what are the things that resonate with them and i as a csm you know i want to do my homework before i get introduced to the customer you know i want to know in my case i had customers who were based in the new york region as well as the ontario province and as part of the homework what i did was these are the products that they have these are the cases that they've logged with my company these are the issues you know these are the things that they've spoken to the account exec to the marketing team to the customer care analyst who's working with them and this is the result that we have given them so far all right i'd also want to look them up in the news to understand their long-term visions where they as a trans agency they want to go into what's their five-year vision and then translate that into what we can do to fulfill that obviously you know when i'm getting introduced to the customer and as i'm forming the relationship with them the closer i am to them they'll see me on the same page the more they trust me as a csm did you connect with all of them on linkedin of course linkedin was one way i also tried setting up you know individual meetings right people who have been recently engaged with you know say someone who's an end user who logged a case with customer care i would reach out to them i would be like you know hey um if possible i'd like five minutes of your time introduce myself and also get to know you know how we've been treating you or how you know how you're liking our platform you know give you a chance to talk all about what you want to talk about for trapeze right at the end of the day as a customer success manager one of the core competencies that's not there in the job description but you have to have is listening right you have to listen to your customers get the key you know artifacts that they're talking about and use that to try to figure out how can i provide them value just so they can trust me more and more so maybe a final question you manage about 30 accounts which is sort of like a hybrid roll between high touch to medium touch as we like to call it from a customer success you must be using some solutions some tools some software to just get by with you know 30 counts it sounds like you're actually pretty high touch with them so what kind of tips do you have for productivity that you're applying on a day-to-day whether it's software tools or any anything else that you do that really helps you out at trapeze we use salesforce as i understood the role in my journey in my three and a half year journey to this point i started getting to know the customers i started to get to know the metrics that matter to them and to us and i started producing these reports i said dashboards that i could you know look up first thing in the morning see what's there what i need to do for you know the customers who for example i haven't spoken to or you know i will be requiring some attention they're turning red in something and i need to follow up on something yeah that helps me the dashboard and the reports that i have those help me determine what customers need to be spoken to about what and you know who all i need from the internal organization on those collaborations so those are salesforce reports and dashboards just to clarify right yes salesforce reports and dashboards yeah are you in salesforce every day logging the activities you have with clients integrating emails you're sending it it must be key for you it is yes it is we log the meeting notes we log the events like the meetings that we have with the customers any leads that are created are also created on salesforce so if i have for example a qbr that i've delivered that too also goes upon salesforce furthermore any survey topics anything any sort of conversation anything i do with the customer is logged on to salesforce that's like our one-stop shop the account execs as well as the marketing team as everyone within the organization uses that's great i want to thank you for your time this has been really really wonderful thank you everyone for joining us today i hope you learned a lot from sakeem's experience stay tuned for other similar videos with other customer success managers we're gonna have a whole series of them subscribe to our youtube channel so you don't miss any of them this will help you get your next customer success job look at the comments below to any related blogs downloadables and cheat sheets and i'll see you at the next video [Music] you

Channel: CSM Practice

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Keywords: Customer Success, Customer Success Manager, Customer Success Management, Irit Eizips, CSM Practice, customer service interview questions and answers, management interview questions and answers, customer success manager, what does a customer success manager do, customer success management, strategic customer success manager, customer success manager job description, customer success manager role, customer success manager saas, customer success job, career in customer success

Id: BXepG6ECa-g

Length: 9min 54sec (594 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020