Like all the other roles, a customer success manager too has its own daunting and dotting times. There are times when you feel your patience is being tested, and then there are times when you feel 24 hours a day ain’t fair! A customer success manager’s duties are sundry in nature. Despite the crest and troughs, sticking to your strengths and taking each day at a time is what you will have to do as a CSM.

This blog is going to help navigate you through a day in the life of a SaaS customer success manager. A customer success manager’s duties include onboarding the newcomers, rendering support whenever necessary, reducing churn rates, and maximizing the value out of the product. Nonetheless, CSMs can have different varying day-to-day activities. Here is a sneak peek of how one day might look like for a customer success manager.

9:00 – 10:00 AM- Reviewing tasks & planning a schedule

As a CSM, it is expected that you will have to juggle through various accounts, rampant meetings, back-to-back calls, and whatnot. Hence, it is best to plan the day in advance and prioritize the day’s tasks. After a quick screening of the mails, they segregate them on the basis of priority and call to action. Then they jot down the to-dos for the day and glance over the customer success platform.

These portals are well-designed to manifest a number of parameters, such as the usage, initiatives, adoption rates, and customer health score as well. If you happen to have a specific platform meant for this which could work out as a game-changer, as it would become very easy to check things instantly and assign attention.

10:00 – 11:00 AM – Coordination within teams

One of the most important customer success manager’s duties is coordination. Be it coordinating between different teams or be it collaborating with customers and resolving their issues if any. This could include coordinating with the product team to enquire about the product roadmap. Or it could relate to the support team and know the status of the tickets raised by the customers and if possible, escalate them too.

11:00 – 12:00- Onboarding and Follow up

CSMs play a pivotal role in onboarding newbies to the company. As this is the first interaction, they begin with a brief introduction about themselves and the company. Then after, they render the basic product training and direct them to the requisite training resources.

Goes without saying, onboarding does not end with a single phone call. A constant follow up takes place with the new clients. Just to see whether they are on the same page or not. Typically, questions like are you liking the product or how is the service going on. If the need arises, they also frequent them with troubleshooting affairs and additional learning.

12:00 – 13:00 PM – Training and Implementations

When you know that your customers or stakeholders are coming to your dashboard anew, training them with a formal note is much needed. Most of the SaaS applications run by business users. Therefore, it is of high pertinence that you get guidance through the portal and sort your queries. The training too is implemented in such a manner that the customer does not feel overwhelmed by all the information, tricky yet informative – pick your choice?

13:00 – 14:00 PM – Lunch/Break time

After a cut-throat morning, filled with calls, appointments, and meetings, it is time for the manager to take a sigh of relief. And thus the break time. As ‘All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy’, it is better for the managers not to follow Jack!

14:00 – 15:00 PM – Communicating value and quality

Again, of the many customer success manager’s duties, one fine aspect is delivering value to the users. This should always be coupled with a clean, crisp, and concise communication, more like the 3C’s of communication. They can leverage the power of different tools and track the growth in your account. Not just that, building account intelligence through analytics and apprising the customer stakeholders of the journey with your product is done simultaneously.

15:00 – 16:00 PM – Handling customer support via channels

Channelizing the network and rendering customer service skills take up a significant chunk of a customer success manager’s duties. The best part about being available on multiple channels is that CSMs can converse with the clients via chat boxes. And can include email, ticketing systems, social media, phone calls, or even video conferencing.

Also, the multitude of problematic affairs dealt with the CMSs can easily curb out when consulted with multiple people.

16:00 – 17:00 PM – Overall checkups and inter-departmental meetings

The end part of the day is just meant to have lucid discussions with the team members. Maybe on how productive and day was, aside from this, they also chalk out the to-do list for the next day. Meetings are instrumental in driving the insights and necessary steps into a call of action. This is where they all discuss any new product facets which a client might find extremely useful.

Further, they are open to feedback during this time. Suggestions on how well are they going, what can be put to emulate, or what is going down is pen down to a discussion.

Other Important Tasks to be Carried Out by CSM Apart from Mundane Activities

As a regular office life of a CSM, apart from the regular activities mentioned above, there are other important tasks to be carried out. Here are some of them:

Preparing for the workday before going to the office

CSMs need to plan their day for the work hours before starting. This includes the number of duty hours at the office. The first thing they need to do is to note down the important tasks to be done for the day in their diary. The next thing is ensuring that they deliver value and communicate it to the customers. The best way to do that is by getting in touch with the customers. So, do customer success managers travel? The answer to that question is yes and no both. Today, most customers can be contacted virtually through the internet in the modern era. Hence, there is no need for CSMs to do extensive traveling. The least they can do is understand the customers’ journey and then lay out a plan to provide a valuable customer experience to retain them for an extensive period.

Understanding and prioritizing customer experience from start to finish

As a CSM, it becomes essential to understand the customers’ needs. One way to do that is by ensuring that your company provides a top-notch customer experience throughout the buying journey. The best way to do that is by studying the NPS and CSAT surveys sent to the customers once they make a purchase. By doing that, the CSM can understand the customers’ expectations and can enhance their product accordingly to retain them for a long time.

Maximize the number of tasks to be carried out in a day without any potential hiccups

There are times when the CSM feels that even 9 hours of duty are not enough to get through the mundane task of the day. The CSM needs to ensure that they maximize the number of productive tasks during work hours during such times. This is where the diary we talked about in the first point comes into play. The CSM can maximize their productivity by carrying out the most number of tasks in a day without any potential hiccups. If they cannot complete a particular task due to lack of time, they can always note it down in the diary as high priority task for the next day.

Wrapping Up of CSM Day

This is where the CSM would end the day by writing down the notes for planning the next workday. A typical end of the day should include the good things and the not-so-good things that the CSM experienced throughout the workday. If there is something that the CSM found challenging to finish in the day, that should be on the top priority task list for the next day. This way, the CSM can drastically reduce their work burden for the next day.

Final Take

When you happen to have a sea of responsibilities ahead of you, each of your days in a week could vary from one to another. Simply put, each of the days in the lives of a customer success manager is unique.

Having said that, all of the customer success manager’s duties can be a tad bit challenging and stimulated as well. How well you plan your moves, what are the steps you imbibe in the proceedings and the outcomes are the answers to the question: How is a day in the life of a customer success manager?

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