Principal Customer Success Manager

Job Description

We are looking for a highly driven and motivated individual who is passionate about building strong relationships and providing a best-in-class customer experience.

Our Customer Success Managers (CSM) consult on a spectrum of Customer Support / Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) solutions from the Zendesk SaaS suite with a wide array of customers.

We ensure customers are optimized and scaling easily through impactful engagements, while driving customers’ business and technical value.

Our priority is to understand our customer’s business, work collaboratively with them to create a Success Plan, and ultimately deliver measurable ROI and customer results using Zendesk.

CSMs align to a portfolio of customers within a specific region and are responsible for retention, minimizing churn / contraction risk while driving product adoption, and identifying expansion opportunities to then collaborate with Sales.

This is done through proactively engaging with customers at specific points in their lifecycle, providing them experiences and recommendations based on their CX maturity.

Alongside your teammates in Sales, Support, and Product Management, you ensure that customers are seeing results from Zendesk and will continue to stay and grow!

What You’ll Do

Mentor and coach junior CSMs, sharing best practices and insights to help them grow and develop.

Lead strategic initiatives and internal projects to drive customer success and business growth directly impacting KPIs.

Build and foster strong relationships with your portfolio of 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 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, and roadmap presentations).

Independently execute customer experience maturity analysis to drive progress and results.

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, 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)

Regularly assess, plan, and document your customer’s success journey with Zendesk via Gainsight.

Expertly escalate matters where needed, including coordinating executive and cross functional teams to execute resolution for customers critical to the business.

Willing and able to travel internationally up to 25%, and easily visit customers and attend companies events.

Who You Are

A proven leader with experience in managing and mentoring teams or junior colleagues.

Experienced in managing Commercial, Mid-Market or Enterprise level accounts.

Well-versed in software and subscription services with excellent customer, partner, and market orientation.

Possess great communication skills and can collaborate and plan strategically with sales counterparts.

Have a background in a technology-related field and familiarity with Customer Support / CX (industry and technology).

Possess strong leadership skills and the ability to influence and inspire cross-functional teams.

Possess high technical aptitude to quickly learn new technologies and then consult on their value.

Self-starter who thrives in both collaborative and autonomous environments.

Strong analytical skills, including experience with Looker, Tableau, or similar software, and experience turning data into insights to fuel your ideas.

Fluent Speaker of German Language

What You've Done

10+ years of relevant work experience in customer-facing customer success, strategic account management ( 10 accounts), or strategic consulting roles.

SaaS experience required.

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 preferred.

Completed Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent career experience.

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.