You’re looking to get out of your current job and want to try moving into tech. Customer Success Management is a role that allows you to carry your existing soft skills (and any tech related hard skills) across to support businesses trying to build a Software-as-a-Service. You’ve ready plenty of PDs or JDs and are pretty confident that you’ll be able to do the job. It’s now a question of whether you would like it or not.
To help you decide, I wrote this blog to detail a day in the life of a Customer Success Manager. It will be variations of this, but I’ll try and cover the main things you do so you have a good understanding of what to expect.
8am
Work has not officially started for the day. I’m up for the day already though. I’m making my kid her school lunch. Meanwhile, I’m checking Slack to see what’s come in overnight (we have offices in the US, while we’re headquartered in Sydney), as well as any emails.
9am
Work has started for me. I flick myself on to “online” in Slack. I work remotely, but I prepare to jump online for our CS team stand up. I check emails on my MacBook and jump onto Slack again (there might have been things that are easier to view on a desktop than mobile).
10am
I’m responding to a group channel in Slack, containing members from different teams on a cross-functional project. This involves using emojis to express my feelings and acknowledge updates, as well as commenting my thoughts on the new developments.
11am
I have a kick off call with a customer. They’re based out in South East Asia and we do the call through Google Meets. A new member of my team is shadowing on the call, so I introduce her. Meanwhile, I’m making notes as my customer tells me what’s important to them, regarding their timeline for delivery.
12pm
My team’s been chattering away on our CS channel. It’s lunchtime there. They’ve gone into the office today. I’m making an update on Gainsight, the Customer Success CRM. Meanwhile, someone from the product team pings me on Slack for some insight into a new feature that’s being built.
1pm
It’s now actually my lunchtime. I change the status of my emoji to something food-related, trying to find something that resembles my actual lunch. If I can’t find it, I go for the good, old 🍔. Calls come in, but I make sure to let them go to voicemail, so I actually get a break.
2pm
Back to work. I’ve had half a dozen missed calls from different customers. It’s end of month, which is a busy time in my industry. A few of them, I respond by email, while the few that are quite technical, so I need to ping my team to double check some details before I call the customer back to walk through the workflow for the issue they’re dealing with.
3pm
It’s my turn for kid duty. I whiz out at 3:30 to pick her up from school. I come back and then commence my outbound outreach for customers I haven’t spoken to in a while. I make sure to dig into their account and use a specific topic to begin conversation with them, instead of just saying, “hi, how’s it going?”
4pm
Final hour of the day. I spend some time looking into the SaaS that I’m supporting. The customer who asked the technical question got me thinking about the workflow. Could it be standardized in anyway? Was there documentation around it? I make a mental note that this development of internal resources is something I can add to my resume as a way of demonstrating initiative in building the value for a company.
5pm
It’s home time!… and I’m already home. I work a bit longer, maybe 10-15 minutes more. I try not to work longer than that. It can be hard to set boundaries. I say bye to my team through Slack, close the lid on my MacBook, step away from my desk and then start thinking about what I’m going to make for dinner that night.
Aaaand that’s it. That’s my standard day. Note that it’s pretty heavily skewed towards remote working. Your day might look different, or it might be quite similar. Industry and company type also have an impact. Do you think this is something you could get used to? Keen to hearing your thoughts below!