Principal Customer Success Manager, CSM

Role Overview

• Build and foster strong relationships with your portfolio of our largest Enterprise customers to minimize churn and contraction and drive expansion by partnering with our customer's technical and business executive leadership team with post-sales implementation planning, proactively guiding customers' technical adoption journey, and enabling them to deliver innovation to their end business users.
• Develop a deep understanding of the customer's business and technical objectives, collaborating with them to build a strategic joint account and success plan with identified objectives, milestones, and measurable KPIs to achieve the outcomes.
• Develop and apply domain/technical knowledge of the Zendesk platform, our best practices, and customer insights to remove blockers and lead key resources, internally and externally, to proactively support customer's success plan.
• Engage regularly with customers based on our touchpoint framework (i.e. user shadowing, strategic discovery, business reviews, adoption assessments, value narratives, roadmap presentations, etc).
• Proactively analyze customer’s product usage data and take necessary actions to mitigate risk, improve product adoption and reduce churn.
• Partner with customer-facing account teams and executives (Sales, Renewals, Advocacy, Professional Services, Product, Engineering, Technical Account Managers and partners) on overall platform success, to accelerate customer's time-to-value journey and to protect recurring renewal revenue and expand customer NRR (Net Retention Rate)
• Independently execute customer experience maturity analysis to drive progress and results.
• Expert at working with a more complex/higher ARR book of business
• Adept at challenging customers where they assess their CX strategy as sub-optimal.
• Understands and distills customers’ corporate strategy and key stakeholders’ agendas in order to guide customers along customer experience maturity journey with measurable outcomes for their business.
• Impact to department productivity/effectiveness. (KPIs)
• High Work Latitude (Level of Autonomy)
• Seen as an escalation point within the team when management is unavailable.
• Creates process and technical structure to support others.
• Regularly assess, plan, and document your customer’s success journey with Zendesk via Gainsight.
• Willing and able to travel domestically up to 25% of the time.

Requirements

• 12+ years of relevant work experience in customer-facing customer success, strategic account management (~10 accounts), or strategic consulting roles.
• SaaS experience required.
• History of success driving customer retention and ARR Growth (GRR) across a book of business above $10M ARR
• Significant experience working with multiple levels of customer stakeholders – technical admins, C-level executives, and procurement teams.
• Experience in a demanding role that requires strong leadership, committed priority management, and high emotional intelligence.
• Proven ability to quickly grasp and distinctly explain technological and business concepts.
• Proven track record of identifying and collaborating on expansion opportunities and strategies with account teams.
• Applied domain/technical knowledge of the Zendesk solution, best practices, and customer insights to remove blockers and lead key resources, internally and externally, to proactively support customer's success plan.
• Zendesk knowledge is a bonus.
• High level understanding of enterprise architecture principles.
• Completed Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent career experience.

Benefits

• Flexible work arrangements
• Professional development opportunities