About the Customer Success Manager role
A Customer Success Manager, or CSM, owns the health of customer relationships after the sale. Their job is to make sure customers reach the outcomes they bought the product for: they run onboarding, drive adoption, monitor account health, lead business reviews, and protect renewal revenue. Where support reacts to problems, a CSM works proactively to prevent churn and uncover expansion opportunities.
The role varies with your customer base. A CSM managing a handful of enterprise accounts works like a strategic advisor, with deep quarterly business reviews and multi-stakeholder relationships. A CSM covering hundreds of smaller accounts relies on health scores, playbooks, and automated touchpoints, and spends more time on one-to-many programs like webinars and email campaigns. Some companies give CSMs a renewal or expansion quota; others keep commercial ownership with sales.
Your posting should make three things explicit: the size and number of accounts in the book, whether the CSM carries a revenue target, and how technical the product is. These three variables define completely different jobs that happen to share a title, and experienced CSMs will screen your posting for exactly them.
Customer Success Manager job description template
Job brief
We are looking for a Customer Success Manager to own a portfolio of customer accounts from onboarding through renewal. Your responsibilities will include guiding new customers to first value, monitoring account health, running regular business reviews, driving product adoption, and partnering with sales on renewals and expansion. To succeed in this role, you should combine relationship-building skills with a data-driven approach to spotting risk early. Ultimately, you will turn customers into long-term advocates and make retention a growth engine.
Responsibilities
- Own a defined book of accounts and be accountable for their retention and health
- Lead onboarding for new customers and shorten their time to first value
- Build relationships with decision makers and day-to-day users at each account
- Monitor usage data and health scores, and intervene early when risk signals appear
- Run regular business reviews that tie product usage to the customer's own goals
- Drive adoption of new features through training, enablement content, and campaigns
- Manage the renewal process and flag expansion opportunities to sales
- Turn healthy customers into references, reviews, and case studies
- Act as the customer's voice internally and channel structured feedback to product
- Coordinate with support and engineering on escalations until resolution
Requirements and skills
- 3 or more years in customer success, account management, or a similar client-facing role, ideally in SaaS
- Track record of hitting retention, renewal, or NPS targets on a defined book of business
- Ability to read usage data and translate it into account health and a plan of action
- Strong presentation skills, including running business reviews with senior stakeholders
- Enough technical curiosity to learn a product deeply and demo it credibly
- Organized approach to managing many accounts and priorities in parallel
- Empathy paired with commercial judgment: you help customers and protect revenue
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience
Nice to have
- Experience with customer success platforms and building health scores or playbooks
- Background in your product's domain, so conversations start from credibility
- Experience carrying a renewal or expansion quota
- A second language if your customer base is international
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