I’ve been in customer success for a fair few years now, cutting my teeth in customer service before making the leap. If you like variety, but also having measurable ways to track your own growth and success, a career in customer success might be right for you.
Before you make the leap, you might be wondering what a customer success manager actually does daily. That’s what this post is all about. Let me take you behind the curtain and show you what my typical day looks like:
- I work remotely, so my day starts at around 7:30am. I get the kids’ lunches ready while making my breakfast. I might log into Slack and check my emails, but for work-life balance, it’s probably better that I actually don’t do this.
- 8:30am. It depends on the day, but we might have an organisation-wide, all-hands meeting, or a department-wide session where customer success managers from the US and Australia log-in to get updates on the organisation. I dial in from my phone, making sure to turn my mike and camera off.
- 9:00am. I’m “officially” online, but likely have been reading emails for the past half hour or so. I check the rest of my channels in Slack for any updates from the US while I was asleep.
- 10:00am. We have a pod meeting for our go-to-market team. This compromises of our sales, customer success and support teams. We shoot the shit for a while before talking about specific customers that we all need to be across.
- 11:00am. Morning tea. Stand up, stretch, make myself a cuppa. Got to make sure that I get some sunshine too.
- 11:30am. Internal meeting with product or design. These are teams that build our digital SaaS. Because we’re at the coalface, speaking with customers, they’ll often show us prototypes or ask us about what customers want to prioritise.
- 12:30pm. This is usually when I start thinking about lunch. If I was smart, I would’ve bought ready-made meals from Aldi that I can just pop in the oven. Otherwise, I might treat myself by going out and grabbing a bite.
- 2:00pm. Customer meeting. It might be a kick-off, if the customer’s new, or it could be a training session during the onboarding phase. Or it could be a deep-dive into a specific workflow or question they have about whether our product can be configured in a certain way.
- 3:30pm. Ad-hoc responding to emails, taking calls/calling customers back and fighting fires. This is usually sprinkled out through the day, but can be busier at month end. Pick up kid from after school.
- 4:00pm. I might spend a bit of time doing some professional development. Learning a bit about Gainsight or analytics that helps me be more of an effective customer success manager.
- 5:00pm. And thaaaat’s time! I’ll often work a bit overtime if there’s a customer issue I don’t want to leave hanging over, but I try to make a habit of finishing on time.
Hardest part about working from home is setting boundaries. I have found myself doing more work at odd hours of the night when I suddenly remembered that I had something to do.
What do you think about remote customer success life? Does it appeal to you? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section belowww…