'Is That a Real Job?' is a weekly series where WIRED explores the latest in...job titles. We explain everything from "customer success manager" to "growth hacker"---and show how you can land these jobs too.
Holly Files is the senior vice president of customer success at a software company called Puppet Labs. That means she runs a team that helps customers get the most out of the software they purchase. This includes training them in the minutiae of the software, solving any problems they might encounter along the way, and, down the road, adapting the software to new situations. "I'm always focused," Files says, "on helping customers be successful."
Customer success management is an increasingly common role in the world of software and tech in general. It combines aspects of several other jobs, including technical support, training, and sales. But it's a bit more proactive than just customer support, since the customer success manager will need to be in regular contact with customers to help them not just solve problems, but find new ways to use the product and to gather feedback the company can use to improve its products.
"Software companies are beginning to realize that they can’t just assume that the customer is getting value," says Mikael Blaisdell, the executive director of the Customer Success Association. "Somebody has to make sure of it, and that person is the Customer Success Manager."
The role is particularly prevalent in cloud-based software companies that depend on customers to keep subscribing to a product month after month. But you can find customer success manager at all types of technology companies that depend on customers periodically renewing subscriptions or support contracts. "When company survival depends on keeping customers and their income streams, somebody has to be responsible for retention," says Blaisdell. "You can’t take it for granted anymore."
According to data compiled by job search site Indeed.com, customer success managers have an average salary of $102,000.
Files---who has over 30 years of experience working in customer-facing roles at technology companies---says that while the title is new, the job isn't. She points out that companies have long employed both account managers to work with customers and encourage them to renew their contracts.
Blaisdell disagrees, arguing that the world of cloud services is different enough from the traditional enterprise software world that the role of a customer success manager is quite different from an account manager. The biggest thing that's changed, he says, is the way that companies think about their customers. "The burden of getting actual value from the software purchase was totally on the customer," Blaisdell says. "That’s not true anymore."
Files agrees that at least one thing is new: that companies are realizing that the main factor in whether a customers sticks around is how successful they are in using the product. That's why Puppet Labs actually has an entire customer success department, headed up by Files, which includes all technical roles that involve interacting with customers, such as professional services, technical support and training.
According to Files, there are two types of customer success manager: non-technical ones, who fill a more traditional sales or account management role, and technical ones, who are tend to be who we think of when we hear the term "customer success manager."
She says that if you want to land a job as a technical customer success manager, you're going to need both people skills and technical skills. She says many customer success managers start their careers in technical support, documentation and training. Non-technical customer success manager, on the other hand, tend to come out of sales or customer service departments.
But you'll need more than just solid people skills and a background in technical communications. Blaisdell says the two most important things are expertise in both the product or service being sold and in the customer's industry. "If you’re selling a machine shop management system, you’d better be able to put on coveralls and a hard hat and go out on the shop floor speaking fluent machine shop," he says. "Otherwise the owner, the customer won’t trust you."
