How to Hire a Customer Success Manager?

Customer success managers are tour guides for the customers. They understand customer needs and pave the way to maximize product engagement and customer satisfaction. 

These managers play different roles in different companies depending on their needs and customer requirements. Most technology companies hire them to build relationships with clients and help them effectively exploit their products or services. The managers engage with the customers and act as representatives on the company's behalf. It becomes the bridge between customer and company to ensure a positive experience and foster long-term relationships.

A customer success manager plays a pivotal role in the company. They build relationships with the customers and refine the product's perceived value. A good CSM can be a key differentiator for business if s/he truly understands their job role and serves the clients. They can significantly cut costs by increasing renewals and enhancing revenue. By acting as a helping hand for the customers, they can reduce customer churn and elevate user experience. 

But what do customer success managers even do? 

Customer success managers play a lot of roles across various departments and disciplines. Let us map out their journey and understand their role in the company. Moreover, we will cover how you can hire a customer success manager for your business with a simple 4-step strategy. 

Why Should We Hire A Customer Success Manager?

The customer success manager performs 4 tasks primarily: 

• Understand business and customer needs
• Build relationships with customers
• Enhance product engagement and customer satisfaction 
• Gain insights and act as a bridge between customer and company 

Customer success managers understand the gap between customers and business. They build a relationship to act as a linking bridge between the two to share insights. They interact with customers on behalf of the company and communicate their problems with the internal team. Finally, they refine the customers' vision by strategically planning and tracking the performance. 

Here are 10 reasons why a customer success manager is a must for businesses. 

1. Handle client relations, including onboarding, training, customer retention, product engagement, and customer satisfaction. 
2. Act as a strategic advisor for customers 
3. Curate and execute customer success strategies
4. Understand customer needs and share insights with the internal team
5. Monitor metrics while giving consistent results 
6. Identify opportunities for growth in the respective assigned accounts
7. Share customer insights which help in future product development and other crucial decisions 
8. Enhance customer satisfaction while up-selling and renewing the accounts 
9. Educate customers to improve product engagement and business revenue 
10. Customer relation management 

How to Hire A Customer Success Manager? 

Hiring an ideal customer success manager can be difficult due to flexible and ambiguous job responsibilities. Their main focus is to ensure a positive customer experience, which could include a wide variety of skills and domain expertise. 

The recruiters must weigh in on the candidates' performance, skills, and interview impression while making the decision. Moreover, they must assess if the person culturally fits into the organization. A cultural fit is vital as the manager needs to work across different departments and actively collaborate with different teams. So, what must a recruiter look for in a customer success manager? 

Who Makes A Good Customer Success Manager? 

A customer success manager's job isn't restricted to one department or domain. They deal with customers and act as a bridge between the customers and the company. So, what skills are required to foster healthy relationships with customers and strengthen a company's brand image?

1. Problem-Solving- The manager must identify customer needs and solve problems/ complexities regarding product usage. 

2. Communication Skills- The manager must have good communication skills as they are the first point of contact for the customers and actively collaborate with different teams and departments. 

3. Relational Intelligence- One of the primary jobs of a customer success manager is to build relationships with customers to win their trust and act as an advisor to enhance the experience with the product. 

4. Team Orientation- The manager has to gather insights from the customers and provide information to the internal team. Hence, s/he must be able to communicate with all the teams and promote the collective effort.

5. Confidence- The manager communicates with hundreds of customers and builds business rapport. They must be confident in their skill set and reflect that in their working style. 

6. Proactivity- The manager shouldn't wait around for customers to reach out and share problems. Instead, s/he must actively engage with them to understand their needs and refine their experience. 

7. Domain Expertise - A customer success manager performs various roles as s/he is the business representative. Hence, it demands a blend of multiple domain expertise such as account management, sales, marketing, project management, etc. 

8. Technological Soundness- Often, a customer success manager is appointed with technical products which need constant support. Hence, a CSM must be technologically sound. 

9. Product Knowledge- Customer success managers work in close relationships with customers to explain the product and enhance product engagement. This demands complete product knowledge regarding its features, benefits, premium offerings, etc. 

10. Strategic Planning- A manager's job is more than just helping customers with product complexities and boosting product engagement. They must aim to cross-sell or up-sell to drive revenue. Hence, they must strategically plan their steps to convert customers into a high-tier product offering. 

Further, based on the job requirements and business needs, the same skill set will vary from firm to firm. 

For instance, if the company is looking to fill a senior position, it would benefit from consulting experience. Similarly, if they are looking for a manager to handle client relationships, they would want someone with a PR or sales background. 

A recruiter must analyze the role and business needs before initiating the hiring process. Once they decide the skill set required and which skills matter the most, recruiters can start the hiring process. 

4-Step Guide To Hiring a Customer Success Manager 

The entire hiring process of a customer success manager can be visualized into 4 steps: 

• Outlining Role Requirements
• Sourcing Candidates
• Conducting Collaborative Interviews
• Hiring and On-boarding 

Outlining Role Requirements

Recruiters' first task for hiring a customer success manager is to understand business needs and map out the responsibilities/ role of the manager in the organization. They must use data to clarify job requirements, responsibilities, qualifications, and other background information required. 

The process starts by understanding the firm's product complexity and types of accounts. For instance, if the product is highly technical, the CSM must be technically sound and have a technical background. However, a marketing and sales background is more relevant if the product is simple and the business requires someone to manage relationships. 

It all narrows down to business requirements. Some examples of varied business needs are: 

• Product Engagement
• Expand Accounts (up-sell or cross-sell) 
• Customer Retention
• Gather Customer Testimonials
• Manage Revenue 

There are much more business pain points that a CSM can target and work upon. The recruiters must outline their roles and responsibilities based on the business needs. Moreover, they can look into data to make an informed and data-driven decision. Some of the data to look for are:

• Customer Feedback- Recruiters can use customer feedback to reverse engineer the attributes required for an effective customer success manager. For instance, if the customers find the product complex, you will need a manager who understands the product and simplifies it for consumers. 

• Customer Metrics- Customer satisfaction, renewal rate, churn rate, etc., can give recruiters insights about the consumers' pain points. This will help them to identify the core strengths required in a CSM. For instance, if the churn rate is high, CSM can build relationships and understand customer pain points to communicate them with the company. Alternatively, s/he can link the customer and the support team. 

• Client On-boarding Trends- Use heat maps and other tools to identify loopholes in the onboarding process and product engagement. These can act as a starting point for improvement and focus areas for CSM. 

This data helps recruiters to map out the CSM job role requirements efficiently. The next step is to source qualified candidates to meet these skill requirements. 

Sourcing Candidates 

Sourcing candidates is more than just posting about vacancies on job boards. The job market is evolving, and restricting traditional ways of hiring will not get you the top talents in the industry. Businesses must invest in a multi-channel approach for sourcing and engaging with candidates. 

Recruiters must tap multiple sources in addition to job boards such as social media, websites, communities, referrals, networks, etc. They must deploy a mix of inbound and outbound channels to build a healthy work talent pipeline.

But does this mean dealing with many platforms and tools, which can be overwhelming and might not give the best result? 

We at Nurturebox make recruiters' jobs easy by helping them with a multi-channel approach to finding their desired candidate without making the hiring process a hassle! We integrate with the existing HR tech stack and take over all the admin tasks of maintaining records and recording past conversations to ease the hiring process. A dedicated tool, especially which can easily be downloaded from the Chrome store as a plugin, can make sourcing effective and effortless. 

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Conducting Collaborative Interviews

Hiring a customer success manager differs from regular hiring as the role covers a wide area and requires active collaboration. The hiring team must also include people from diverse domains of expertise who will directly work or collaborate with the CSM. 

The next crucial part of the interview is to choose questions wisely to assess their abilities like upselling, communication, cross-selling, project management, etc. Here are some questions to ask your customer success manager candidates. 

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• Which are the critical metrics for customer success?
• How do you track multiple customers?
• How do you measure customer success?
• What is your definition of customer success?
• What are some vital tools and technologies for customer success?
• How did you handle any of the customer's churn experience? 
• How to avoid customer overturn?
• How would you deal with (or dealt) with a changing/ dynamic customer project scope? 
• What type of environment do you foster in your team?
• Share an experience when you felt hostile or angry at a customer; how did you deal with it?
• Share an experience where you went above and beyond for a customer.
• How do you deal with different opinions in a group?

To ensure no bias in the interview process, deploy tools for blind screening and interviews. Moreover, recruiters can use various tools to automate and scale the entire hiring process. 

Hiring & On-boarding 

The final step after finding the desired candidate is hiring and onboarding them. Evaluate the candidates to fit your business needs and provide a balance of performance and soft skills. Once chosen, ensure an effective onboarding process, which can improve employee motivation and retention. Here are 3 ways to provide a positive onboarding experience. 

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1. Discuss the scope of work & communicate responsibilities to give clarity to the new employee about their roles and responsibilities. 
2. Set communication channels and specific POCs for easy collaboration with the internal team without hassle. 
3. Implement comprehensive training programs, especially for work-from-home managers, to ensure improved performance. 

Hiring A Customer Success Manager Successfully with Nurturebox 

The best way to hire effortlessly and get a desired candidate is by standardizing the hiring process. This will help recruiters to hire a good customer success manager and fill any vacant role with qualified candidates.

We at Nurturebox help companies automate and scale their hiring process to ease out the sourcing and engaging process. 

• Download our Nurturebox plugin from the Chrome store and integrate it with your current HR tech stack. 
• Head to LinkedIn or Naukri.com to find the desired candidates. Now let Nurturebox do its job of maintaining records and data for each candidate that you want. You focus on engaging, and we take over all the admin tasks. 
• Engage easily with candidates using Nurturebox to manage multi-channel approaches effortlessly. 
• Finally, interview the desired candidates and hire your ideal employee!