Satisfying customers is integral to the continued success of every company. While providing value through your product or service contributes to customer satisfaction, there’s more to customer service and success than a great offering.
In addition to selling your customers something that provides them value, you also need to help them extract that value. As you’re growing your company, you should hire people to enable your customers. Here are some job descriptions for roles you should consider filling:
Job Descriptions for Customer Service, Support and Success
Customer Support Representative
Customer support reps communicate with customers about any problems or questions that arise in their use of the product or service. These communications can be through email, phone calls, live chat or social media.
Customer support reps might not always be able to solve the customer’s problem themselves, which is why triaging and ticket distribution can be part of this role. A customer support rep needs to be able to speak with a customer, recommend relevant self-service support resources and if none of those solve the problem, forward the customer’s query to an appropriate specialist.
Experience level: entry-level
Customer Support Specialist/Technical Support Rep
Customer support specialists’ jobs are similar to customer support representatives. However, customer support specialists have the technical knowledge to solve a customer’s problem.
In some cases, a customer support specialist may still be handling initial support outreach communications through email, phone or chat, but they may also just be receiving tickets from customer support reps and focus solely on resolving those tickets.
Experience level: junior
Customer Support Manager
Customer support managers oversee a support team and their processes. They’re responsible for setting goals for the team, empowering their team members to reach those goals and communicating support trends with the rest of the company.
Customer support managers will also help train new support reps and facilitate continued training for the rest of the team. They may report to a VP or Director of Customer Support.
Experience level: Mid-level or senior
Customer Success Manager/Customer Success Associate
Customer success managers (CSMs) assist individual customers to leverage your company’s product or service. Their goal is to optimize the value your customers gain from their engagement with you so that they don’t churn.
In order to facilitate customer success, CSMs will need to communicate with marketing, sales and your product or service team to understand what expectations and goals your customers have and help those goals get met. CSMs may also be responsible for monitoring your company’s customer journey and tracking how clients progress through it.
Experience level: junior or mid-level
Customer Success Team Lead
Customer success team leads oversee customer success managers. They’ll help train new reps, set goals for both individuals and the team as a whole, track how their team’s performance is contributing to the overall success of their company and assist with escalations when needed.
Depending on the size of their company, customer success team leads may report to a Director or VP of Customer Success to ensure that their team’s performance is contributing to their company’s growth.
Experience level: senior
Client Experience Manager/Customer Relations Manager
Client experience managers work to ensure satisfaction across a company’s client base.
They’ll be responsible for collecting and analyzing customer feedback such as NPS surveys and product or service reviews. Additionally, they’ll work across all customer-facing teams to help create a consistent, positive experience.
They may also be responsible for customer journey mapping and progression tracking in collaboration with customer success managers.
Experience level: junior or mid-level
Client Retention Manager/ At-Risk Customer Support Manager
Client retention managers work specifically to decrease churn and improve sentiment for at-risk accounts. They may be consulted by customer success managers or support reps to help with escalations or be responsible for monitoring accounts for signs of escalation themselves.
This role typically requires collaborating with multiple teams across a company in order to ensure the needs of at-risk clients are met.
Experience level: mid-level
Implementation/Onboarding Specialist
The specifics of what an implementation or onboarding specialist is responsible for will depend upon a company’s product or service. This specialist is responsible for overseeing the sales-to-service handoff and facilitating implementation or onboarding for customers.
For a SaaS product, this role would be responsible for setting up the tool to meet a customer’s needs, helping them become familiar with how the tool functions and encouraging adoption. For a service, this role might be more focused on introducing a customer to their main points of contact for service delivery.
In some cases, this job isn’t a standalone role but rather tasks split between customer success managers and operations specialists.
Experience level: mid-level
Customer Service Representative/Performance Consultant
Customer service representatives proactively reach out to customers with offers, product details or strategic recommendations. Their role is a hybrid between customer marketing, sales and account management. Their role involves proactively helping customers gain more value from the company’s offering and trying to upsell or cross-sell.
Customer service reps typically work with a high volume of accounts but have minimal touches with each individual customer.
Experience level: entry-level
Customer Service Manager
Customer service managers oversee the customer service team and ensure all reps are meeting their goals. They will assist with any problems that arise and mentor team members.
Additionally, they will train new reps and facilitate the team’s continued training, including keeping all reps up to date on any company changes that will impact their customer outreach.
Experience level: mid-level or senior
Operations Specialist
Depending on the size of an organization, the operations aspects of customer service, support, success and engagement can be enacted by the business’s general operations team, be split among members of a general operations team or be a standalone role.
- Service operations specialists oversee the tech stack that enables product or service delivery. They are responsible for setting up systems of measurement and ensuring all technology functions properly for customer-facing teams and maintaining systems for collecting customer feedback.
- Customer support operations specialists are responsible for maintaining the tech stack used for ticket management, triaging and support communications. They’ll need to ensure ticketing systems are functioning properly and customer support managers are able to monitor and measure their team’s performance.
- Customer success operations specialists manage the technology and processes used by customer success teams. This can include setting up the tools necessary for customer journey mapping, establishing systems of measurement and ensuring customer communication platforms are functioning properly.
Experience level: junior or mid-level
Chief Customer Officer
A chief customer officer (CCO) is an executive position that is responsible for overseeing customer-related initiatives and ensuring a company is actually operating in its customers’ best interests. They make sure that customer service, support, success and experience strategies are unified across departments and that customers are represented in executive decisions.
Experience level: Senior
The Takeaway
Depending on the size of your company, not all of these jobs exist. However, just because there isn’t a role dedicated to solely overseeing one of these functions doesn’t mean that it can be overlooked completely. Instead, the responsibilities of various customer success, support, service and experience roles might be combined into the job descriptions of other departments within a business. For example, technical support responsibilities might fall to the product development team at a small software company.
However, if your company wants to scale in a customer-centric way, once you reach a size that enables you to devote resources solely to customer enablement, you should. Otherwise, your customers may be inadvertently put on the back-burner — which will negatively impact your company’s continued growth and success.
