Strategic Customer Success Manager

About Smartnumbers

We are on a mission to stop fraud and improve customer authentication. Fraud is a huge problem affecting millions of people, it costs the UK nearly £7bn and represents 40% of all crime. Too often the solution has been to put in place cumbersome authentication processes that frustrate genuine customers, cause inefficiencies for organisations and fail to prevent fraud. We are changing this by providing organisations with real-time insight into the risk of a caller. We combine patented machine learning technology with our deep domain knowledge to prevent contact centre fraud. We recognise that we need to work together to fight fraud, that is why we have fostered strategic partnerships with leading global organisations like Amazon, BT, Genesys and NICE. Together, we protect the UK's largest retail banks, investment banks and emergency services.

What you'll be working on

As a Strategic Customer Success Manager, you will protect and grow Smartnumbers' revenue by driving strategic relationships with our key customers, ensuring they continuously realise maximum business value from our existing and new solutions. Within the role you will be expected to:

• Achieve and exceed revenue renewal and new business targets on a quarter-by-quarter basis in line with annual targets.
• Own the success, retention and growth of a portfolio of strategic customers, ensuring sustained adoption and value realisation from Smartnumbers’ solutions.
• Build trusted advisor relationships with senior stakeholders, understanding customer objectives and aligning solutions to evolving fraud and contact centre challenges.
• Lead structured, outcome-focused quarterly business reviews, communicating fraud reduction, operational impact and value delivered to executive audiences.
• Accurately update and maintain business tools (such as a CRM) to efficiently process all opportunities and enable accurate and timely management reporting.
• Develop and maintain customer success plans that connect Smartnumbers’ capabilities to customers’ strategic and commercial priorities.
• Act as the voice of the customer internally, collaborating with Product, Sales and Operations to prioritise initiatives that deliver measurable success outcomes.
• Identify and mitigate risks to customer satisfaction and retention, escalating and coordinating action as needed to protect long-term relationships.
• Contribute to the evolution of customer success best practice, sharing insights and expertise across the wider Customer Success function.

The role is strategic, commercial, and customer-facing. You will influence how our customers approach fraud prevention while directly contributing to Smartnumbers' revenue growth and market positioning.

What you'll need for the role

Smartnumbers values diversity of experience. Candidates should have a strong combination of several of the following skills, competencies and experience:

• Commercial ownership & growth
• Portfolio revenue accountability: Own renewal and expansion targets for your assigned customer base, ensuring revenue protection and growth objectives are consistently achieved.
• Pricing and contract negotiation: Lead commercial discussions with customers, structuring pricing proposals and negotiating contract terms that balance customer value with company margins.
• ROI-based business case development: Build compelling financial justifications for upsells and expansions that demonstrate clear return on investment aligned to customer fraud reduction goals.
• Opportunity identification and qualification: Proactively identify expansion opportunities within accounts by understanding evolving customer challenges and matching them to Smartnumbers' capabilities.
• Strategic relationship management
• Executive stakeholder engagement: Build and maintain trusted relationships with senior operational leaders, positioning yourself as a strategic advisor on fraud prevention.
• Outcome-focused business reviews: Conduct quarterly or bi-annual reviews that articulate delivered value through fraud metrics, ROI analysis, and strategic alignment rather than feature updates.
• Customer roadmap development: Create forward-looking plans that connect Smartnumbers' evolving capabilities to customer strategic objectives and commercial priorities.
• Trusted advisor positioning: Act as the go-to expert on fraud detection strategy, helping customers navigate emerging threats and optimise their prevention approaches.
• Customer advocacy & product influence
• Champion customer voice internally: Represent customer needs, challenges, and feedback across Smartnumbers, ensuring their perspective shapes strategic decisions and product direction.
• Act as the bridge between customers and Product, helping to foster a customer-centric collaboration that delivers consortium-wide value.
• Cross-portfolio insight synthesis: Identify patterns and trends across your customer base that inform broader product strategy and market positioning.
• Value delivery & optimisation
• Drive continuous outcome realisation: Ensure customers consistently achieve measurable fraud reduction and business benefits from Smartnumbers' solutions throughout the relationship lifecycle.
• Measurable benefit articulation: Translate technical capabilities into business metrics that resonate with customer leadership and align with industry standards and regulatory requirements.
• Solution optimisation guidance: Advise customers on best practices, configuration improvements, and usage patterns that maximise the effectiveness of fraud detection.
• Proactive health monitoring: Track customer health indicators and address risks or issues before they impact satisfaction, value delivery, or renewal probability.
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Coordinate internal resources: Work across Product, Sales, Marketing, and Analyst teams to deliver on customer commitments and ensure seamless execution of initiatives.
• Drive consortium engagement and event participation: Partner with Marketing to maximise customer attendance and value at Smartnumbers events, fostering peer collaboration and strengthening the consortium community.
• Share market intelligence: Feed insights from customer conversations back to Sales and Product teams to inform go-to-market strategy and competitive positioning.
• Collaborate with teams to share success patterns, implementation learnings and customer insights across the organisation.

Key Skills & Attributes

• Commercial acumen
• Strategic pricing and negotiation: Ability to structure commercial proposals, negotiate contract terms, and balance customer value with business profitability.
• Financial analysis and business case development: Skill in building ROI models, analysing customer economics, and articulating value in financial terms that resonate with executive buyers.
• Revenue forecasting and pipeline management: Capability to accurately forecast renewals and expansion opportunities while managing a commercial pipeline.
• Relationship and communication
• Executive presence and stakeholder management: Confidence engaging with senior operational leaders, building credibility, and influencing decision-making at strategic levels.
• Consultative selling and advisory skills: Ability to position yourself as a trusted advisor rather than a vendor, guiding customers through complex fraud prevention challenges.
• Compelling storytelling and presentation: Skill in crafting outcome-focused narratives that connect technical capabilities to business impact in executive business reviews.
• Active listening and problem diagnosis: Capability to deeply understand customer challenges, ask probing questions, and identify root causes before proposing solutions.
• Strategic thinking and influence
• Customer strategy development: Ability to create forward-looking roadmaps that align Smartnumbers' evolution with customer strategic priorities and market trends.
• Product influence and prioritisation: Skill in synthesising customer feedback into actionable product requirements while filtering requests through a lens of consortium-wide value.
• Market and competitive awareness: Understanding of the fraud detection landscape, competitive alternatives, and industry trends that inform customer conversations and internal strategy.
• Operational excellence
• Proactive risk management: Skill in identifying early warning signs of customer dissatisfaction or churn risk and taking corrective action before issues escalate.
• Capture insights, success patterns, and customer intelligence in formats that benefit the broader organisation.
• Time management and prioritisation: Ability to balance competing demands across multiple strategic accounts while focusing energy on highest-impact activities.
• Personal attributes
• Customer-centric mindset: Genuine commitment to customer success and the ability to see situations from the customer's perspective while balancing business needs.
• Resilience and adaptability: Comfort operating in ambiguity, handling difficult conversations, and adapting approach based on changing customer circumstances or market conditions.
• Collaborative spirit: Natural inclination to work across teams, share credit, and achieve outcomes through influence rather than authority.
• Continuous learner: Curious about fraud trends, customer success best practices, and emerging technologies that could benefit customers.

Required Background

• Professional experience
• Customer success or account management expertise: Proven track record of delivering customer success and account management for a SaaS product in an enterprise environment, with demonstrable evidence of protecting and growing revenue.
• Financial services or fraud prevention background: Experience working within or selling to financial institutions, payment processors, or organisations focused on fraud detection and risk management.
• Commercial ownership: Demonstrated success owning renewal and expansion targets, negotiating contracts, and consistently delivering against revenue objectives.
• Strategic relationship management: Established capability building and maintaining relationships with senior operational stakeholders and influencing organisational decision-making.
• Industry knowledge
• Fraud prevention landscape: Understanding of fraud detection challenges, particularly in contact centre and telephony environments, with awareness of evolving threat vectors.
• Financial services sector: Familiarity with banking operations, payment processing, regulatory requirements, and the commercial pressures facing financial institutions.
• Educational background
• Degree qualification: Bachelor's degree in business, finance, technology, or related field (or equivalent professional experience).

Desirable experience

• Experience with consortium or intelligence-sharing models
• Background in working closely with product teams
• Exposure to telecommunications or contact centre technologies
• Track record in managing enterprise accounts with complex stakeholder matrices
• Experience presenting to senior leadership audiences

This isn’t a checklist, and we don’t expect you to tick every box; however, a strong desire to learn quickly, get stuck, and deliver value is essential. If you think that sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you and find out if a career at Smartnumbers could be your next great move!

What we can offer you

As well as a competitive base salary of circa £60,000 per annum and attractive commission plan, we also offer a comprehensive benefits package, covering a variety of areas, both professional and personal. These benefits include:

• Hybrid working style, with the expectation of two days in the office (with a great City of London office base!)
• Family friendly benefits including paid parental leave policies
• An extensive health insurance policy for you, with an option to add your family members
• A workplace pension with Hargreaves Lansdown
• Life insurance of 4 x your salary
• Weekly self-development time to spend exploring your professional development interests
• 25 days of annual leave (plus bank holidays), your birthday off, and an opportunity to buy up to 5 days annual leave per year
• A holistic wellbeing support plan encompassing a variety of offerings to assist you. We provide you with a monthly £50 allowance to fund activities to best support your wellbeing as well as workshops and training to provide tools and guidance.
• Additionally, there is a wide-ranging employee assistance programme available to advise on personal, family or financial matters, and also fun social events during the year.

The application process

We have a simple 4 stage application process:

• 30-minute phone call with the hiring manager
• 1 hour competency-based meeting with the hiring manager
• 30-minute meeting with the wider team members
• HR and Bar Raiser Interview

Smartnumbers is committed to promoting equal opportunities in employment. You will receive equal treatment regardless of age, disability, neurodiversity, gender, gender identity, gender reassignment, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. We welcome all applications for this role. We are committed to providing reasonable support/adjustments in our recruiting processes. If you need support, please reach out to the hiring contact.