Principal Customer Success Manager

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 then 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!

What You’ll Do

• 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 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.

Who You Are

• 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 familiarity with Customer Support/CX/ES (industry and technology).
• Possess strong leadership skills and the ability to influence and inspire cross-functional teams.
• Possess high technical aptitude to quickly learn new technologies and then consult on their value.
• Self-starter who thrives in both collaborative and autonomous environments.
• Strong analytical skills, including experience with Looker, Tableau, or similar software, and experience turning data into insights to fuel your ideas.
• Leader amongst peers, supports colleagues and covers for management when needed.
• Leads the business by identifying new customer experience trends both in and outside of their book of business.
• Overcomes most barriers and escalates effectively when other options are exhausted.
• Expert escalation at all levels including coordinating executive and cross functional teams to execute resolution for customers critical to the business.
• Available to work at the London office 2 times per week.

What You've Done

• 12+ years of relevant work experience in customer-facing customer success, strategic account management (~10 accounts), or strategic consulting roles.
• SaaS experience required.
• History of success driving customer retention and ARR Growth (GRR) across a book of business above $10M ARR.
• Significant experience working with multiple levels of customer stakeholders – technical admins, C-level executives, and procurement teams.
• Experience in a demanding role that requires strong leadership, committed priority management, and high emotional intelligence.
• Proven ability to quickly grasp and distinctly explain technological and business concepts.
• Proven track record of identifying and collaborating on expansion opportunities and strategies with account teams.
• Applied domain/technical knowledge of the Zendesk solution, best practices, and customer insights to remove blockers and lead key resources, internally and externally, to proactively support customer's success plan.
• Zendesk knowledge is a bonus.
• High level understanding of enterprise architecture principles.
• Completed Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent career experience.

This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in‑office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.