Customer Success Manager
Thiruvananthapuram - India
Job Summary
We are looking for a Head of Customer Success to own the post-sale customer relationship from the moment a contract is signed through implementation adoption and support to renewal and expansion. Customers should experience us as one connected journey not a sequence of handovers between disconnected teams. This role is the single senior owner that makes that possible.
This role suits someone who combines the instincts of a trusted advisor with the rigour of a programme manager comfortable leading a team navigating complex implementations and driving customer outcomes. One of the key challenges in this role is bringing structure clarity and consistent execution standards across the full customer lifecycle.
1. Customer Onboarding & Implementation
- Own the customer onboarding experience from contract handover through to go-live
- Partner with delivery and BA teams throughout implementation to ensure the customer experience remains coherent and expectations are met at every milestone.
- Drive demo and UAT standards ensuring customer requirements are reflected in what is presented and tested before sign-off.
- Manage the post-go-live hypercare period and formally close it with the customer.
2. Ongoing Success & Relationship Management
- Build and maintain Customer Success Plans for every account reviewed and updated regularly.
- Run structured Monthly Business Reviews and Quarterly Strategic Reviews with customers.
- Monitor account health across adoption engagement support and satisfaction intervening early where needed.
- Define what good looks like at each stage of the customer journey and ensure it is consistently executed across the team.
- Maintain an accurate up-to-date view of the entire customer portfolio at all times.
3. Renewals & Expansion
- Own the renewal process identifying risk early addressing it proactively and leading commercial conversations with confidence.
- Identify and address root causes of churn working cross-functionally to reduce avoidable attrition.
- Identify expansion opportunities and partner with sales to develop and close them.
- Support the conversion of short-term engagements into long-term contracts by demonstrating clear evidenced value.
- Build the business case for growth using customer outcomes usage data and agreed success metrics.
4. Change Request & Support Governance
- Ensure CS has full visibility of all change requests from the point of escalation through to resolution.
- Define support escalation paths and equip the support team to resolve issues independently where possible.
- Own customer communication on any high-impact issue delays scope changes or critical bugs.
5. Voice of the Customer
- Establish a regular feedback loop between customers and the product team.
- Prioritise and present customer input based on portfolio-wide impact not individual volume.
- Represent the customer perspective in internal roadmap and product discussions ensuring customer insight actively informs product and delivery priorities.
- Partner with product and delivery teams to improve adoption reduce support friction and influence roadmap decisions.
6. Team Leadership & Practice Development
- Lead mentor and develop the CS team setting standards and coaching people toward them.
- Define clear ownership boundaries between CS support and delivery.
- Build and maintain CS processes playbooks and documentation that are not dependent on any single individual.
- Report on CS team KPIs NPS CSAT health trends renewal rate consistently to leadership
- 3 years of experience in Customer Success Account Management or a hybrid CS/delivery role in a B2B enterprise software environment.
- Demonstrated experience managing post-sale client relationships across the full lifecycleonboarding implementation ongoing success and renewal.
- Prior experience building or improving a CS function not just inheriting a mature one.
- Proven ability to lead and develop a team with a track record of building accountability and ownership culture.
- Strong programme management skills able to manage cross-functional dependencies and keep multiple workstreams on track.
- Sufficient product fluency to engage meaningfully with implementation decisions and hold substantive conversations with customers without technical support.
- Commercially sharp understands retention churn and NRR and can build a renewal or expansion case independently.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills across all levels of an organisation.
- Data-informed decision-makercomfortable acting on imperfect information and using metrics to guide priorities.
- Able to move fluently between strategic thinking and operational detail knowing when each is needed.
- Experience working alongside delivery BA or product teams in an enterprise software environment.
- Ability to influence and align cross-functional teams without direct authority.
- Comfortable working in a scaling environment where processes are still being defined.
- Familiarity with CS platforms health scoring methodologies and CRM tools.
- ITIL certification is an advantage.