Since providing exceptional customer service is an essential element of corporate success in today’s competitive world, customer success managers (CSMs) are becoming increasingly important in a variety of fields. In fact, there is a 100% potential that the demand for customer success professionals will expand significantly. According to LinkedIn’s Emerging Jobs Report, one of the top emerging jobs in the United States is customer success, which is also dominating the global rankings.
Pursuing a customer success manager role also offers other alluring benefits. These include a competitive annual salary that, according to Salary.com, ranges from $97,140 to $135,233. So, if you’re considering becoming a customer success manager, expect plenty of excellent opportunities awaiting for you.
Are you curious about how you can pull off an impressive resume that will help you get this job? Worry no more! In this article, we will explore what a customer success manager is, and how to write an effective customer success manager resume with an example. Read on.
What is a Customer Success Manager?
A customer success manager (CSM) is a role that is in charge of a customer’s total success and is regarded as a crucial player in brand loyalty and business growth. Customer success managers concentrate particularly on long-term objectives, including promoting adoption, providing value, and securing return on investment. They are also responsible for bridging the gap between the sales and support teams within an organization in order to foster excellent client relationships, client loyalty, and customer retention.
Along with having a broad range of client experience, CSMs are renowned for their expertise in industry software and technologies including IT networking, XML, and web servers. In addition to technical proficiency and exceptional customer service management capabilities, this position also demands high levels of supervisory or management skills.
What are the Duties of a Customer Success Manager?
Depending on the sector and company they work for, a customer success manager’s responsibilities may vary. But regardless of the firm they work for, their primary function is always the same: to increase customer retention through proactive customer support and enable the ongoing improvement of a company’s growth and profitability.
Apart from the main responsibilities of customer success managers, here are a couple of more duties that CSMs need to perform to become an expert in their field:
- Act as the primary point of contact between a business and its clients.
- Maintain positive relationship with the company’s existing clientele while establishing new ones.
- Promote the business and inform clients of the ways in which they can satisfy their particular requirements.
- Take charge of onboarding new customers and educating them on using company products.
- Gather data and share it with other departments to ensure that company decisions reflect customer needs.
- Focus on boosting revenue and customer happiness for the business.
- Work closely with Sales and Customer Support teams in negotiating new or renewed contracts.
How Do You Become a Customer Success Manager?
It’s not surprising that you would want to hop on board and begin your career in this industry after finding out the opportunities entailed in the customer success manager role. However, there are several key factors you should take into consideration to begin your career path, and some of these are:
- Getting formal education: A high percentage of employers requires a bachelor’s or master’s degree for this position, thus acquiring formal education in business management, computer science, communications, or other related subjects is essential.
- Obtaining industry skills: Skills are crucial in a customer-centered service field, so spending a few years gaining appropriate experience and honing your customer or account management skills will help you land this job.
- Honing expertise in related systems: Familiarity with certain types of customer relationship management (CRM) or CSM software will also give you a competitive advantage.
- Acquiring additional credentials: Earning professional CSM certifications will also help validate your skills to future employers. These include Certified Customer Success Management Professional (CCSMP), Cisco Customer Success Manager Certification, and The Success League CSM Training Certification Program.
What to Include in Your Customer Success Manager Resume?
As a customer success professional, you need to be effective at promoting company’s products and brand to onboard new clients. Similarly, in order to be taken into consideration for a customer success manager position, you must showcase your professional skills and experience in the best possible way. But how will you present your qualification and expertise to the hiring manager? Start by arming yourself with a strong customer success manager resume with the necessary sections.
Not familiar with the standard resume sections? Read on to know the sections needed to include on your resume, and how to present them in such a way that hiring managers would take your qualifications into account and trust your credibility.
Contact Information
The top part of your customer success manager resume must include your contact information to make it easier for potential employers to get in touch with you for an interview. Always list your full name, address, phone number, and email address. Other extra details you might consider including are relevant links to your professional portfolio, such as your LinkedIn profile or a professional website.
Specific Target Job
Right after your contact information, include a career tag or your desired position to make it easier for hiring managers and recruiters to grasp the position you’re applying for.
Qualifications Profile
Replace your professional resume objective with a qualifications profile or a resume summary that outlines your accomplishments, skills, and relevant experience. This section is much more effective in explaining your qualifications and convincing the hiring manager that you’re a good match for the position.
Areas of Expertise
When creating your resume, it’s also crucial to include areas of expertise or skills section as it gives hiring managers a quick snapshot of your skills and abilities. This section can help you, not only highlight your skills, but also make your customer success manager resume obtain a high score on the applicant tracking system (ATS).
Industry Skills
Since customer success managers need a broad skill set to succeed in their roles, it’s crucial that you sort out and choose what skills you should put on your resume. With that said, here are the top skills you should emphasize on your customer success manager resume in order to stand out from the competition:
- Communication: Customer success managers are the link between customers and businesses, so they need to be effective at communicating with customers and team members.
- Account Management: Retaining loyal customers and helping the company grow by creating connections with new customers is also essential skills that a CSM must have.
- Customer Relationship Management: CSM must be able to build strong relationships, and gain trust and loyalty with customers and potential clients.
- Customer Service: Customer success managers need to be customer service-oriented and must thus provide exceptional customer experience by being helpful, responsive, and professional at all times.
- Technical Acumen: CSM often need to use a range of software tools to stay in touch with customers, analyze data, and spot issues. Hence, be sure to include the software and system of your expertise.
Professional Experience
The section that hiring managers give the most weight to concerns the applicant’s work history, so make sure to use it to your advantage. When describing your work history in your customer success manager resume, start with your most recent job and work your way down to your earliest role. Include the names of companies and their locations, as well as your job titles and employment dates.
In addition, to help the hiring managers to swiftly review your employment history, it is strongly advised to use bullet points in highlighting your job descriptions, important contributions, and accomplishments.
Expert tip:
ATS captures resumes that are keyword-optimized so make sure that you pick the most suitable keywords and highlight them on your professional experience section to help you rank high on the ATS and increase your chance of being shortlisted by recruiters.
Education
Take note that academic background is one of the factors in the recruitment process. Thus, in order to catch their attention, make sure your education section is well-written. Include your complete degree and course title, school name and its location, and the dates of your graduation. Plus, mentioning your awards, honors, recognition, and scholarships you have received gives you a step ahead of the competition.
Professional Development
One way to impress hiring managers is to highlight your training, certifications, and licenses because it shows that you are a good fit for the position. Therefore, if you have training, certifications, and licenses relevant to customer success management, do not forget to include them on your resume.
Additional Sections to Include on Your Customer Success Manager Resume
You might also want to include professional affiliations, activities, technical skills, and projects sections relevant to your target job to give your application more heft and lend it more credence.
How to Write Your Customer Success Manager Resume
Now that you know the essential sections needed in a resume, it’s time to figure out how to write your own customer success manager resume. To help you, we’ve listed some resume trends and writing tips you must take to create a top-notch customer success manager resume.
1. Use simple fonts and a professional layout.
Simple formatting and font choices across your resume might help it look better to hiring managers. Additionally, computer scanning software would be able to analyze your resume easier, thereby improving your chances of overcoming the ATS.
2. Choose the best resume format.
Create your customer success manager resume using the best format possible to emphasize your qualifications, skills, and experience. If you offer a strong career trajectory related to the field, chronological resume format should be your first pick. However, you can also use different resume formats, such as functional, targeted, or a combination resume format, to highlight your qualifications that you can contribute to their organization.
3. Highlight your relevant skills.
Since you’re applying for a customer success manager position, you must highlight the skills relevant to the job. Make sure to include a mix of hard and soft skills in customer service, account management, or related computer systems to demonstrate your capacity to carry out a range of customer success manager duties.
4. Include the right resume keywords.
Hiring managers use ATS to make the hiring process more efficient and find the best candidates. So it is important to sprinkle your resume with plenty of the right resume keywords to have a better chances of it being filtered by the software and onto the hiring manager’s desk.
5. Quantify your accomplishments using concrete data.
When listing your accomplishments, use strong action verbs and add figures instead of just plain words and information. Doing so will make you stand out from other job applicants.
6. Proofread, proofread, and proofread.
Check and reread your customer success manager resume to see and correct any grammar and punctuation mistakes. Remember, maintaining an error-free resume can improve your chances of landing job interviews.
Customer Success Manager Resume Example
Are you curious about what an effective customer success manager resume looks like? Check this resume sample and see how our skilled resume writers prepared a top-notch resume for this position.
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If you want a job in customer success management, you need to properly sell your customer-facing experience and excellent communication skills to hiring managers through a strong resume and cover letter. Follow our tips on how to write CSM resume to stand out from the other competition.
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