How to Get a Job in Customer Success

There’s never been a better time to find a job working in customer success.

Companies around the world are waking up to the fact that investing in customer success produces real results. We know, for example, that companies that prioritize the customer experience can generate 60% higher profits than their competitors. And that even something as small as a 5% increase in retention can result in a 75% increase in business profits.

Want to be a part of helping companies achieve results like these? Build a career working in customer success.

What Does a Customer Success Role Do?

Okay, so this one is kind of self-explanatory. Customer success people help make a company’s customers more successful. Obviously.

But what does that actually look like on a day-to-day basis? The following are some of the responsibilities you might be asked to take on in a customer success role.

Developing Deep Product Knowledge

Customer success roles are most commonly found at SaaS, software and other tech companies – typically those where high levels of product complexity mean that customers will need some hand-holding from the get-go.

As a result, customer success reps are often called on to offer personalized training or to customize their programs to meet customers’ specific needs. And they can’t do that well if they don’t have a deep knowledge of the product, what it can do and how it can be customized.

Onboarding in any customer success role should involve building this knowledge, but it’s just as important that CS reps continually educate themselves as new features roll out or as new use cases are developed.

Onboarding New Customers

Sometimes this is referred to as “enablement” or “implementation,” but the meaning is the same: getting customers to the first point of perceived value as quickly as possible.

In some cases, this might mean referring new customers to existing training materials, including pre-recorded webinars, videos or FAQ/knowledge base articles. In other cases, it might mean hopping on a screen-sharing session to offer one-on-one guidance and hands-on demos.

Many SaaS companies define specific onboarding packages, which may include set tasks or a certain number of hours (in which case, you’ll be expected to work within the guidelines provided). In others, you may be given more freedom to offer support as needed or to develop your own onboarding package.

Training Existing Customers

Your goal here as a CS rep is to keep your existing customers engaged and successful. I’ve heard before that “a happy customer is not necessarily a successful customer.” Just because someone doesn’t have problems doesn’t mean they’re getting the most out of your company’s product. That’s where ongoing training comes in.

In these cases, you might be called on to:

• Make sure existing customers are using the full functionality of your product (vs the modules or components they feel most comfortable with)
• Help existing customers navigate new feature roll-outs or bug fixes
• Retrain existing customers if a product changes significantly

You might perform this kind of training on an as-needed basis, or it might be part of a cadence of check-ins you follow in response to specific customer engagement milestones. You may even be a part of classroom training sessions (either online or offline) that train large numbers of customers at once.

Working Closely With Other Stakeholders

Besides the relationships you build with the customers you support, you’ll be expected to work closely with other team members, including:

• Project managers, with whom you’ll share project status updates, based on how the customers you work with are engaging with the product overall.
• Product managers, by reporting your observations of the product or the experiences of the customers you work with.
• Customer service and support reps, to help solve problems as needed.
• Account managers and salespeople, who will want to know the status of their accounts (particularly around renewal times or as opportunities to upsell/cross-sell customers arise).
• IT and other developers, to whom you’ll report any bugs you encounter (or any other relevant observations as you work with the product). 

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it should give you a feel for the cross-disciplinary nature of customer success. Your customers need guidance to be successful. You need strong relationships with other departments to serve them successfully.

Monitoring Customer Success Metrics

Customer success is an inherently data-driven field. As a result, you may be expected to monitor the following metrics, among others, on a per-account basis:

• Customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Revenue per account
• Churn rates
• Renewal rates
• Expansion revenue (more on this here)

Engagement metrics may also be defined by your company to catch any customers who are failing to achieve key milestones. If they aren’t, set your own once you understand the customer journey and what’s needed for customers to move successfully between each stage.

Common Customer Success Job Titles

If you’re new to the field, you’re probably going to start out with a lower-level title, like Customer Success Associate or Customer Success Coordinator; as you move up, your title will change to reflect that.

Here are some of the most common customer success job titles, along with general pay ranges:

You might also find that customer success roles aren’t necessarily labeled with the words “customer success” (for example, a “Customer Advocate” role serves a similar function). At the higher levels, customer success might be combined with something else – for instance, a “VP of Implementation and Customer Success.”

What Does It Take to Be Good at Customer Success?

I mentioned above that customer success is a data-driven role, so it’s true that – if you want to work successfully in the field – you’ll need to be good with numbers.

But being good at customer success takes a lot more than analytical ability. A while back, I spent 90 days working in customer success at my company Mailshake. The following are a few of the other traits I saw being helpful in executing the role:

• A willingness to be proactive. Customer success is inherently proactive (compared to customer service or customer support, which are more reactive). That means that you have to be someone who’s willing to think ahead and to figure out what people might need before they do. If you aren’t good at prediction or forward thinking, customer success might not be for you.
• The ability to see the bigger picture. Often, the biggest problems getting in the way of customer success don’t have anything to do with your product. They’re happening due to issues in your customers’ workflows outside of your solution. So if you truly want to be able to enable their success, you need to be able to see the bigger picture and to be able to offer suggestions that go beyond the features offered by your solution.
• A comfort level talking to people. This one should go without saying, but I’m emphasizing it here because I still see people getting into customer success roles without it. Customer success requires talking to people and dealing with their issues. If you hate the thought of picking up the phone and calling someone, you’re going to hate working in a customer success role.

One other skill I’ll add here that wasn’t in my post on my time in customer success at Mailshake is this: you have to care about people. You have to be willing to make their success your success. And not everyone can do that. Not everyone cares on that level. But without a genuine desire to help your customers get results, you’re not going to succeed in a customer success role.

How to Land Your First Job in Customer Success 

To a certain extent, finding a job in customer success isn’t that different from finding any other job – you build your network, find jobs, apply for them, interview and hope that the process ends with you updating your current position on LinkedIn.

However, if you don’t already have a background in customer success – and many people getting into the field don’t – there are a couple of extra steps you may want to take:

Translate Your Past Experience to Customer Success

There are plenty of positions that work directly with customers that aren’t explicitly customer success roles. If you have experience working in customer service, customer support or even account management, you may be able to translate that experience to the kinds of qualities hiring managers are looking for.

Shadow Existing Customer Success Workers

If you can, try to connect with existing customer success workers and shadow them (or at least interview them about what their jobs are like). Not only will this give you a better understanding of what hiring managers are looking for, it’ll help you determine whether you really want to work in customer success in the first place.

You can find customer success workers to talk to by searching LinkedIn in your area for the titles above. You might also want to check out this article on a day in the life of CSMs or find customer success leaders on Clarity.fm to interview.

Take a Customer Success Certification Course

I’ll talk more about the specific courses you may want to look into in another article, but taking a CS certification course is a good idea for a couple of reasons. Not only is it a great way to learn about the demands of the work, but having a completed certification on your resume may be helpful when you’re applying for jobs.

Do you have to go through a certification program to land a job in customer success? Definitely not. I’ve never seen a position description requiring a specific certification to be considered (though that doesn’t mean they don’t exist). Certifications can be nice if your resume needs a boost, but a track record of real-world success is always going to trump a piece of paper (or, in this case, a digital certificate).

Learn Common Customer Success Tools

Finally, even if you’ve never worked professionally in customer success, you can make yourself more marketable by learning common technologies in advance. Gainsight, Natero and ChurnZero are three popular tools, but there are plenty of others out there. Research them, grab any free trial you can and learn how you’d use them to measure the metrics I listed above.

Starting Your Customer Success Career

Customer success is a great field to be a part of – now, more than ever, as more and more companies discover how powerful this discipline can be.

If you’re ready to make a move into a customer success career, the tips above (and keeping an eye on current trends) should give you some direction for beginning your job search. Even if you’ve never worked in customer success, it is possible to find and land a role that’ll help you make a real difference in the lives of the customers you serve.

Are you working in customer success? If so, what other tips would you add to this list? Leave me a note below sharing your thoughts:

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