Principal Customer Success Manager; CSM

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 Services (ES) 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 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!

• 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 the 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.

• Experienced in managing Enterprise level accounts with high levels of complexity.
• High level of understanding of the customer and employee service industry and competitive landscape.
• Established as a SME for certain products, industries or segments.
• 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…