Over the last ten years or so, cultural trends and customer expectations have combined, resulting in more and more businesses prioritising customer success.

Research shows that there was an increase in the number of open customer success jobs in June – the first increase since February. There were 6,515 jobs posted in June, up nearly 500 from May.

Regardless of the size of the organisation, gone are the days of sales and marketing departments delivering business goals. Today, it’s critical to have the customer success department straddling sales and marketing to achieve deliverables.

Customer success versus customer service

Customer support roles tend to be reactive by nature as they respond to inbound customer requests, complaints and issues. The opposite tends to be the case when it comes to customer success roles.

These roles are focused on employees working proactively in partnership with customers post-sale to ensure they maximise the value of the product or service, and any issues are headed off. It’s key that customer success delivers a positive customer experience and creates a close professional relationship.

Done correctly, customer success leads to business success. It’s also a vital contributor to customer loyalty. When you help your customers succeed, they become promoters and advocates of your business. Customer success is connected to your bottom line, as it:

• Minimises customer churn rates.
• Improves renewal and satisfaction.
• Boosts revenue.

But what can possibly go wrong with customer success?

For starters, to maximise productivity, organisations may allocate too many client accounts to one team or representative to look after. Or weight incentives are heavily towards revenue generation. Or worse still, assign the wrong people to the role.

Spend any time with a sales organisation and you are likely to hear a similar story. A story about a consistently top performing sales rep who failed to make the transition to sales manager.

And the reason?  The skills and attributes required to succeed as a salesperson are vastly different to those required to be a top manager. The same is true when it comes to customer success managers (CSMs).

The abilities and traits required to be a successful CSM are many and varied. Selecting the right people for this role certainly presents elements of risk.

So what makes a great CSM?

Firstly, there is no one size fits all. Factors like industry type and service or product offering contribute to the answer.  CSMs usually possess a broad business experience. It’s not uncommon for people with backgrounds in sales, support, presales, project management and even marketing roles to have made successful CSMs.

When we ask managers what makes a great CSM, they usually tell us their best people are proactive and tend to have similar traits such as:

• Great at managing stress
• Resilient
• Empathetic
• Customer-focused
• Sincere
• Keep promises
• Positive attitude
• Calm in a crisis
• Self-assured
• Socially relaxed
• Strong reasoning and analytical ability
• Great communicators

It’s quite the laundry list. The complex nature of backgrounds combined with the challenge of pinpointing the varied attributes that align with your business and service offering is where many organisations fail.

And studies tell us that failing to get the right person that fits your organisation will result in a decrease in productivity, higher levels of staff turnover and high levels of job-related stress.

Determine the requirements and spot the people

The challenge for organisations today, especially in the current tight market, is identifying the best potential CSMs.  Typically, in our work, we observe many organisations that rely on the job description, resumes and reference checks when making hiring or re-deployment decisions. And this results in a high level of three out of four recruits who just aren’t the right fit.

It’s a case of ‘rubbish in = rubbish out”. If we don’t have the right information, how can we possibly make the right decision?

Using our next gen tools, we have worked with many clients and helped them profile the critical success attributes that establish fit for a role. Using our robust 4-step process, our clients in the main enjoy a three-fold increase in pinpointing top people that excel, a 47% reduction in team turnover and a significant increase in productivity.

The war for talent is in play right now in Australia. You owe it to you and your business to remove the higher risk of getting it wrong.

Contact Great People Inside if we can help recruit your next CSM or top performers for other important roles to benefit your organisation.