The Perfect Hire for Customer Success

The exponential growth of Customer Success proves that this is not an area to be overlooked. It is important to find the right people when forming your Customer Success team to ensure that your customers understand the value of your product and how your product can add value to them.

Here are several key points to keep in mind when hiring for your CS team, in order to maximize productivity and efficiency within the organization, and to ensure that the needs of your customers are met by your team.

1. Identify the Right Experience

For a Customer Success Manager job, find professionals with a position starting with ‘Customer’, followed by Success, Support, Service, Account Manager, Marketing, Lifecycle Management, and so on. Probably the one with the right mindset and one who is used to catering to customer’s needs. Shifting to CS from these types of positions is a natural transition, and won’t require as much training for the employee to get up to speed.

2. Prioritize Emotional Intelligence

Customer Success Managers are the face of the company. They must have the ability to maintain cordial relations with clients.

3. Diversify your Team

Hire a diverse group of employees – ones who are young, trainable and can fulfill any role for Customer Success.

4. Create the Perfect Fit for Customers

A diversified team has to have members that are the right fit for each customer profile. E.g.: Match customer demographic with CSMs background/expertise.

5. Hire from Within

Look for new members within the organization. They could be employees that have used the product intensively. It also solves budgeting and overcrowding issues.

6. See the Big Picture

Remember the key elements that will help in forming a well-rounded operation. Focus on finding members with the right experience and personalities.

As a director of Customer Success, while hiring, check a Customer Success Managers resume and look out for technical knowledge, communication skills and domain experience as few key requirements for the role. A Customer Success Manager job description includes functions such as onboarding, training, providing updates on the industry, predicting churn in advance and ensuring that customers use your product or service and are happy with it. If not, they should discover the problem and take remedial measures. This is similar to customer service, but it’s more proactive in nature. Within the United States, the average salary of a CSM is $106,007. However, as it is a relatively new area that is still developing, this figure is subject to rapid changes.

Hiring for a CS organization usually involves hiring for a wide variety of roles. A Customer Success Specialist can be referred to a variety of roles. It can involve being a Customer Success Executive that converses with and manages customers on a daily basis. It could involve the person one step higher who manages this executive and ensures their work is well-executed. It also refers to a Customer Success consultant or trainer role. Customer Success Engineer helps in bridging the gap between the products and services of the organization and the end customers.