Digital Customer Success Managers achieve client success by onboarding customers, following the customer lifecycle journey, monitoring the customer health score and knowing the difference between client and customer.
By following a customer success playbook or a customer success model, and monitoring standard customer success KPIs by capturing quarterly business review examples on a CSM platform or CSM software, this allows a business to build their own specific KPIs for customer success.
Firstly, let’s consider the main challenges for a business once a customer purchases their software, depending on your role within a business, this will vary.
Some are keeping the customer engaged, driving further adoption and customer retention over the years in such a competitive environment.
A general rule of thumb is that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.
So where does a Digital Customer Success Manager fit in?
Over the years new roles have appeared as companies developed their sales force and split it up into Pre-Sales, Sales and Account Management. New names for salespeople appeared e.g Business Development Managers. Recently the birth of Customer Success Managers occurred, a more engaging Account Manager.
As successful global businesses regularly obtain new customers and manage to retain their existing ones it can sometimes become overwhelming handling the different types of customers. From the customer who wants a fully engaging partnership model down to the ones who are content with the return on investment and are happy to pay their annual support and maintenance fees and keep to themselves. The former is more straight forward due to continual quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and discussions, the latter however can be tricky especially when it comes to renewal time. Champions and coaches can move on from their jobs, their replacements may need to get familiar with the value proposition to understand why they need to keep paying the annual support fees. How can all this be done at scale? What is the best way for a software vendor to use and spread company resources to keep their finger on the pulse of their customers’ satisfaction during contract periods?
While studying for my MSc Digital Business at Salford University, I have completed a module on Project Management, Leadership & Skills, one on Digital Business & Entrepreneurship and I am almost finished the Search and Social Media Marketing. I have been able to apply this in my latest role while working on team projects to digitally transform engagement with our contented customers.
About Me
Good day, my name is Kilian McGetrick, I am Irish and I am living in Heidelberg, Germany.
Over the 30 years of my career, I have worked in Dublin, Ireland; Sydney, Australia; London, UK; Karlsruhe and Frankfurt, Germany. I have worked remotely, on the road and in offices. My experience has spanned presales, sales and customer success, in advertising, unified telecommunications, and for the past 10 years, software.
I enjoy building business relationships throughout organisations to partner with my clients to supply the best fit with the greatest return on investment.
Kilian excels at selling complex technical products, including managing and executing on sales processes in a global, corporate environment.
I got to know Kilian when working for Thomson Reuters (TR), where we were involved with the same software product line for academic research (CRIS and Research Analytics). Kilian was a Software Solutions Specialist in Sales, while I was a Product Manager. Our paths thus regularly crossed in areas such as go to market strategy, product pricing, and tender processes.
Kilian is a great colleague to work with. His knowledge about the TR academic research products was impressive. He always kept it up to date, and easily translated it into customer facing documents and presentations. I also remember Kilian for his ability to locate the right people within a corporation such as TR, whenever a cross-functional task needed to be accomplished, often including several departments. For example, when hosting was introduced as a service, pricing ranges needed to be determined based on information from different groups. Kilian persistently kept those cross-functional teams working together until the work was done, and the necessary information delivered to sales teams or customers.
Kilian is gifted at describing product or service benefits and conditions both clearly and realistically. In summary, I recommend Kilian very highly as a sales person in any leading role, as well as a business partner.
Birte Lönneker-Rodman – Head of Professional Services – semantha
I had the pleasure of working with Killian in the particularly challenging Central London marketplace. Killian is the kind of person everyone wants on their team (both manager and colleague alike), this is due to the fact that he was warm, friendly, upbeat and great to have around, he gets on with everybody. In addition to this, he knows his stuff, he works hard, he’s a sales expert and he gets results – consistently!
He’s a top performer, if I ever needed a Salesperson or a Sales Manager, I’d take him before anyone else beat me to it!
Martin Clarke – Account Manager – Unit4
