Published November 16, 2022
Client success is one of the fastest-growing and most in-demand areas of the tech industry. There are many different types of client success career paths, each with its own set of responsibilities, skills, and knowledge.
Here's a guide to the different types of client success job roles.
A client success manager (CSM) is responsible for overseeing a company’s relationship with a specific client. Stepping in as a deal is agreed, their job is to ensure that a company’s clients are satisfied with its products or services. This involves guiding clients through sales into the support phase, ensuring a smooth client journey.
Strong, direct relationships with clients are the central feature of a CSM’s job. They work closely with clients to understand their needs and pain points, and develop strategies to improve client retention and satisfaction.
A CSM teaches their clients about the company’s products and how to get the best use out of them. In this sense, they’re almost a mentor for the client, helping them to grow their business using the tools the company provides.
Their key tasks include:
Ultimately, the CSM’s goal is to help the client succeed, on the basis that this will lead to greater profit for the company. Like most of these roles, it’s relatively new and has emerged out of the growth of software as a service (SaaS) business models. In 2020 alone, the number of roles like this rose by 34%.
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A client training specialist develops and delivers programs that teach clients how to use a company’s products or services. They design training materials, such as manuals, videos, and webinars, and conduct training sessions to ensure that clients are able to use the products or services effectively.
Key responsibilities include:
As a specialist, a client trainer is likely to be called on by different teams to provide the resources and courses they need. They deal with a client just long enough to train them, then move on to the next task, but may work repeatedly delivering the same course or supporting the same products for different audiences.
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A client engagement specialist is responsible for developing and executing strategies to increase client interaction and loyalty. They work with clients to identify their needs and develop plans to keep them engaged with the company. They also work closely with other teams within the company, particularly account managers and CSMs, to brief them on approaches to client engagement and to ensure that the company is taking a consistent approach.
The ultimate aim of this is to reduce client churn, as well as to upsell and cross-sell products and services. While an engagement specialist is less likely to make that sale themselves, they lay the groundwork to keep the client on board and make the sale possible.
Their key tasks include:
Key skills include:
A client insight analyst collects and analyses data to understand client behaviour. They use this information to develop strategies to improve client satisfaction and retention.
This is a complex and often technical job. The best client insight analysts draw on a wide range of perspectives, using a mixture of numerical data, qualitative information, and psychological insights to understand the behaviour of clients. They then turn this into reports with practical recommendations that help colleagues create better operational and marketing strategies. The aim is to understand what motivates customers, then use this in support of business interests.
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The high stakes and technical skills involved mean that there’s a lot of demand for good client insight analysts. The growth of big data and AI analytical techniques will only add to the spread of skills required in the coming years, and to the demand for analysts.
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Sitting between sales and product development teams, a sales engineer provides technical support to a company’s sales team and helps in explaining and selling technical products to clients. Like many client success careers, this involves understanding both the clients’ needs and the potential of the company’s products, to translate between the two and find new ways for clients to make the most of the products.
Sales engineers sometimes work closely with clients to understand their needs and match them with the appropriate products or services. This is often done in collaboration with sales teams, who bring stronger sales experience but benefit from a sales engineer’s technical experience.
It’s a job that requires more imagination than the title implies. Finding novel ways to meet client needs while translating between the different assumptions of clients, salespeople, and engineers can make the job both challenging and rewarding.
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This role is particularly common in companies connected to complex technical or scientific fields, where a higher degree of technical specialty is needed to understand, explain, and use products. Sales engineers may need to understand the specific scientific fields involved.
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An implementation specialist uses their technical knowledge to help clients install and configure a company’s products or services. They work closely with clients to ensure that the products or services are set up correctly and are working, so that the client can make good use of the products and have a positive experience.
To do this, implementation specialists work with clients to understand their unique needs, priorities, and challenges. Based on this knowledge, they act as a liaison between engineers and the client, often playing a hands-on role in configuring the software. They customise systems to suit the client, importing data, modifying interfaces, and altering metrics. They may provide relevant training in using the system or help to shape the deliverables of training specialists. They are often the primary point of contact for a new client.
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An account manager is responsible for maintaining relationships with a company’s clients. They work closely with clients to understand their needs and develop plans to create success for each client.
While a CSM is focused on strengthening the client and developing a long-term relationship, an account manager is more driven by the bottom line. Sitting somewhere between sales and support, their job is to retain clients and grow revenue. The role is often more reactive in its nature, and action tends to cluster around the time when renewals are due or upsells available, rather than communicating regularly across the client journey.
Because they’re developing less in-depth relationships, account managers tend to work with a larger group of clients, while deploying more limited resources. They are more likely than a CSM to refer clients to other business functions for support and are more likely to be involved in identifying potential new clients.
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Key skills include:
A client success director is responsible for developing and executing the client success strategy for a company. They determine the path that will be followed to keep clients engaged and retained.
The director’s leadership is the cornerstone holding together the work of those in other roles listed here. They provide direction and oversight, coordinate efforts across teams, and find opportunities to improve.
While leading the client success department, they also work with other business functions within the organisation to cover the critical overlap between client success and all relevant teams. They also ensure that the client success team is aligned with the company’s overall goals.
Key tasks include:
Key skills include:
If some of these roles sound similar to each other, there’s a reason. Client Success is a relatively new field, emerging from the growth of the current tech market. The market and this field are developing fast, so existing roles are constantly evolving and new ones emerging.
Because of this, the lines between some of these jobs are very unclear. One company’s product manager might be doing very similar tasks as another’s sales engineer. The crossover in skills and duties means that there’s plenty of potential to shift from one of these career paths into another. Give it another ten years, and the roles may have shifted again, but many of the skills and responsibilities will remain the same. As long as software services remain important, so will client success teams.
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