The role of customer success manager as the customer’s single point of contact
Customer Onboarding
A customer needs a single point of contact when they are being onboarded to your product. For a customer success manager, it is one of the most critical tasks. It is critical because, the customer doesn’t have to be burdened with complete knowledge of the product at this stage, and needs to be educated on the features that will help them achieve their goals. Being at the strategic inflection point, the customer success manager needs to make adjustments in the onboarding process accordingly, thus reducing the probabilities of customer churn.
Handling customer escalations
Having a customer success manager as the customer’s primary point of contact, also helps in bringing down the number of support escalations. The customer can feel assured that they can reach out to the assigned person for any concerns and it also helps in building a healthy relationship. Success managers also need to periodically do a health check of the accounts in their portfolio to improve the last mile efficiency.
Renewals
The relationship with the customer, gives the customer success manager all the visibility needed and hence carry the responsibility for bringing in recurring revenue in the form of renewals. They need to regularly follow up with the customer for renewals so that there are no surprises at the last minute.
Upselling
One of the key KPIs of a customer success manager is increasing the lifetime value of a customer. Hence, though they don’t carry sales targets, they have a huge role in upselling, cross-selling, and upgrades. Since they guide your customers throughout their journey and help them get resolution to their issues, it makes it easy for the success managers to identify opportunities.
Customer Advocacy
Success managers, given their relationship with the customers, are also responsible for translating the relationship into advocacy. Typically it is executed in the form of NPS surveys, requesting product reviews, case studies, and referrals. Thus, successful customer relationships also results in revenue growth.
Having a focused customer success team can actually take your organization to the next level, and hence it is important to assign the best suited resources to this role.
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