At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead strategic customer engagement and drive product adoption for maximum value.
- Company: Join Blackboard, a leader in educational technology with a focus on customer success.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, travel opportunities, and a chance to make a real impact.
- Other info: Dynamic role with opportunities for growth and collaboration across teams.
- Why this job: Be a trusted advisor and help shape the future of education technology.
- Qualifications: 7-10 years in Customer Success or Account Management within SaaS.
The predicted salary is between 60000 - 80000 £ per year.
Location: This role is open only to candidates residing in England or Scotland due to operational constraints.
About The Role
Our Customer Success Management team ensures that customers realize maximum value throughout their Blackboard journey. The role of the Senior Customer Success Manager (Sr CSM) is to lead strategic engagement with customers to understand their goals, drive product adoption, influence long-term outcomes, and identify growth opportunities. The Sr CSM operates as a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders and ensures strong alignment between customer objectives and Blackboard’s capabilities. This role works collaboratively across Blackboard teams to deliver a seamless customer experience while supporting strategic initiatives that contribute to retention, expansion, and long-term partnership success. The ideal candidate brings a strong customer-first mindset, excels at building executive-level relationships, and consistently drives measurable business outcomes across the customer lifecycle. This role requires travel 30-50% of the time.
Responsibilities
- Leading the development and execution of strategic account plans to ensure customer objectives are achieved and value from Blackboard solutions is maximized.
- Serving as a trusted advisor to senior and executive stakeholders, guiding customers on best practices, adoption strategies and long-term success.
- Driving product adoption and value realization across Blackboard solutions, using data and insights to inform engagement.
- Partnering closely with Sales to identify, shape, and support expansion opportunities, contributing to growth and retention outcomes.
- Playing a key role in renewal strategy and execution, ensuring alignment on value and positioning for successful outcomes.
- Providing strategic guidance and recommendations to help customers solve complex challenges and achieve institutional goals.
- Proactively monitoring customer health, identifying risks, and leading mitigation strategies for at-risk accounts.
- Acting as the primary point of coordination across internal teams, ensuring alignment and effective delivery for the customer.
- Influencing internal stakeholders to drive improvements in customer experience, product adoption and service delivery.
- Maintaining a high level of expertise across Blackboard solutions to support value-driven, outcome-focused conversations.
- Managing and maintaining accurate account plans, activities and customer data within systems such as Salesforce and Planhat.
- Supporting customer engagement through community participation, events and strategic programmes.
- Representing Blackboard as a trusted partner and building strong relationships across customer organisations.
Required Skills And Experience
- 7–10 years of experience in Customer Success, Account Management or related customer roles within a SaaS environment.
- Demonstrated experience managing complex or high-value customer accounts.
- Strong track record of driving customer outcomes, retention and growth.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to engage effectively with executive stakeholders.
- Strong commercial awareness and ability to contribute to renewal and expansion strategies.
- Advanced problem-solving, critical thinking and strategic planning capabilities.
- Ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across a matrixed organisation.
- Highly organised with the ability to manage multiple priorities and competing demands.
- Strong emotional intelligence and relationship management skills.
- Experience working with CRM and Customer Success platforms such as Salesforce and Planhat.
- Fluency in written and spoken English.
Preferred Skills And Experience
- Advanced degree.
- Fluency in European languages.
About Blackboard
Blackboard advances teaching excellence and unlocks the full potential of technology to deliver meaningful outcomes. We empower institutions to deepen connections between educators and learners, inspire engagement and drive long-term academic success across the full learner journey.
Senior Customer Success Manager employer: Blackboard
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