It’s normal if you’ve been running your company with a generalist customer success manager. And it's natural for you to add more people to your team as you grow. But it gets overwhelming to choose a few critical roles from the myriad of choices.

This is why we’ve come up with a list of 6 crucial customer success roles that you can choose from. In this blog we’ll cover:

• 6 crucial roles in customer success department
• 5 responsibilities of customer success department

TL;DR

• The VP is responsible for increasing your company's revenue expansion, product utilization, customer retention, and decreasing the churn rate.

• The chief customer officer ensures two things— first, your whole organization is working in sync by uniting the executive team to a customer-centric mindset. Second, your company is delivering the experience that your customer desires.

• The customer success director focuses on pre-sales and customer success management by creating the plan for account management and analyzing the product adoption and customer experience.

• The responsibility of a customer success management team leader is to work on the cross-functional processes and track the whole customer success infrastructure.

• A customer success manager works as a bridge between your company and your customers by analyzing their needs and behavior patterns and communicating it to the sales, marketing, and product department.

• The responsibility of a customer success analyst is to help your business analyze and optimize every aspect of your company's engagement with your customers by creating data-driven reports.

• In the onboarding phase, understanding your customer's needs and behavior patterns should be the top-most priority of your CSM team.

• To increase the retention rate and get more business, you "need" to listen to your customer's needs and feedback.

• Letting your customers know about the changes made in the products they are using or about the changes within your company can help you build a long-lasting relationship with them; the CSM department can help you best with this.

• You "don't" need to look at your competitors to hire for any role; analyze your business needs and take the steps that suit them the most.

Customer success roles

1. VP of customer success

Who is the VP of customer success?

The VP of customer success is one of the most crucial customer success roles. The VP of customer success leads to a better team and successful customers.

What do they do?

A VP plays a key role in customer success by ensuring business transformation, revenue expansion, product utilization, achieving customer goals, and customer retention while decreasing churn rate.

They also help your organization by applying their strategic vision and innovative approach to lead the critical customer-facing team of your company.

Key responsibilities

• Supporting customers with onboarding, training and building long-term multi-stage projects.
• Working with your sales team to engage with prospective and existing customers to understand their goals and level up your product according to the customer's goals.
• Representing the customer voice and promoting a customer-centric mindset in the organization while also influencing the internal stakeholders.
• Helping your organization with hiring, training and building a world-class customer success team.
• Leading, mentoring and expanding the CS team by setting OKRs and KPIs.

2. Chief customer officer

Who is the Chief customer officer?

A chief customer officer is a person who focuses on your organization's customer service, customer retention and building a long-lasting customer relationship.

What do they do?

They are responsible for uniting the executive team to a customer-centric mindset so that all the departments within the organization work in sync to deliver the desired and consistent experience.

Key responsibilities

• Promoting and maintaining the customer-centric mindset in your company.
• Working with executive team members to create the customer success strategies such as CS training programs or customer loyalty programs.
• Working on building and maintaining a loyal customer relationship to increase your company's advocacy, engagement, and expansion.
• Centralizing the customer data, creating a comprehensive view of the same, and ensuring its accessibility to all team members.

‍3. Customer success director

Who is the Customer Success director?

The director of customer success is the person who builds and leads the success team of your organization.

What do they do?

They are responsible for creating the strategic plan for the account management, analyzing the product adoption and customer experience, and focusing more on the pre-sales and customer success management.  

Key responsibilities

• Working on driving growth through net retention improvements.
• Analyzing customer satisfaction and overall health scores while also driving new business growth.
• Driving operational practices to track team members' performance.
• Working with the sales management team to keep track of strategies, coverage plans, renewal forecasting to maximize the opportunities and reduce the risk rate.

4. Customer success management team leader

Who is the customer success management team leader?

A customer success management team leader is the one who creates the workflows and plans everything for the customer success team and directs them.

What do they do?

Their responsibility is to coordinate cross-functional processes and track the whole customer success infrastructure.

Key responsibilities

• Managing and analyzing the daily tasks of the customer success team.
• Analyzing the at-risk renewals and creating the CSM playbooks to prevent the risks.
• Updating CS funnels, customer segmentation and engagement models.
• Analyzing causes for customer success, opportunities, and churn.

5. Customer success manager

Who is the Customer Success Manager?

A customer success manager is a person who builds relationships with your customers and guides them through the sales process.

What do they do?

CSMs ensure that both the potential and existing customers get the support needed to achieve their goals. They also communicate customers' needs and behaviors to the sales, marketing, and product team to improve the ultimate experience for users.

Key responsibilities

• Connecting the customers with the support team to solve their technical issues.
• Understanding the customer's needs, likes, and dislikes through conducting surveys or getting reviews and sharing the information with the sales, marketing, and product department.
• Following up with the customers religiously for product renewals.
• Communicating with customers to help them understand your business is how your product can help them achieve their goals.
• Onboarding new customers by educating them on your products.
• Encouraging upselling and cross-selling.

6. Customer success analyst

Who is a Customer success analyst?

A customer success analyst is a person who ensures the customer service satisfaction store is maintained, and the service level agreements are met.

What do they do?

They are responsible for converting your customer success operation into data-driven reports so that your business can analyze and optimize every aspect of your company's engagement with your customers.

Key responsibilities

• Monitoring usage and maximizing retention of your organization.
• Analyzing and resolving customer support concerns.
• Keeping up with trends and analyzing information to diagnose problem areas to reduce churn.
• Continuously following up with the customers to ensure they have a positive experience.
• Coordinating with other departments to guide them and provide recommendations for their improvement by analyzing their key indicators and metrics. 

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5 responsibilities of a customer success department

1. Onboarding

Onboarding is one of the top-most priorities for the customer success team because when customers start using your product with a feeling of confidence, the chances of the company’s success increase significantly.

The onboarding phase should focus more on the features your customer needs to learn. And it’s the responsibility of customer success team to strategize and look for it. 

2. Collecting customer feedback

Regularly checking up with your customers and ensuring whether they are satisfied with the product or not and if the product is meeting their needs is another important job of the customer success department.

After collecting feedback, the customer success department should analyze both the feedback, i.e., feedback on the product itself, and feedback on the overall experience of using that product to ensure whether the customer has a smooth experience or not.

3. Being a customer advocate

To increase the retention rate and get more business, you need to improve the bottom line — you need to listen to your customer's needs and feedback. The CSM department represents customers to your company by analyzing their needs, goals and behavior patterns.

They also communicate the information with other departments to strategize how your company can help customers with what they are looking for. At the same time, they think also align everything with the company’s goals and vision.

4. Upselling

The customer success team helps your company increase your customer's lifetime value through upselling as they have a rapport with your customers and are more likely to listen to their advice. 

As the customer success managers understand your customer's needs and behavior patterns, they know how to approach and convince them about using your additional products or updating their current plans to premium ones.

5. Updating customers

The CSM department helps your company build and maintain a long-lasting relationship with your customers by keeping them informed of the new products and the changes to the products they are using.

Customers feel more confident when they feel aware of what's going on with the product and your company and the changes made in the product they use.

Wrapping up

Every organization is different, and the number of people you need to manage your operations differs according to your needs.

And sometimes, you won’t need the person your competitor needs. So basically, you need to reflect upon your needs and strategies before posting your next job description for the candidate.