Overview
The Customer Success team is responsible for ensuring the success of Planview customers and maximizing value of the Planview solutions inside the customer base. The Director, Customer Success, owns driving, scaling, and inspiring a talented team of individuals focused on customer success. The ideal candidate will have experience building customer success programs that deliver results. This role requires strategic skills, strong relationship-building skills, creativity, exceptional communication skills, and a customer first attitude.
Responsibilities
- Serve as escalation point for the region’s customer issues to ensure they are resolved quickly and drive toward anticipating issues and resolving them in advance.
- Reduce customer churn/loss, increase renewal rates, upsell, cross-sell and expansion of product and services.
- Increase customer satisfaction through delivery of a programmatic customer journey that delivers value outcomes for our customers.
- Provide guidance, training, and education for all activities related to the Customer Success teams, including strategy and tactics for proactive CSM engagement with customers to ensure retention, drive customer optimization and adoption, while providing a positive customer experience.
- Tracking and reporting on key customer success metrics including satisfaction metrics, both informal and formal, both proactive and reactive; renewal rates; ARR growth/decline; customer retention rate; upsell rate; cross-sell rate; and customer behavior patterns.
- Refines and manages rigorous risk assessment processes to assess retention risk consistently and accurately in the account base.
- Excels at communicating value to customers and drives and coaches the team to do the same, routinely leading C-level conversations.
- Ensures the Customer Success Managers are developing relationships vertically and horizontally in the customer organization.
- Drives development and execution of customer Success Plans that are aligned with the customer and all who ‘touch’ the customer (Sales, Services, Customer Care, etc.).
- Develops and assigns data driven retention targets across the team to achieve desired outcomes.
- Regularly forecasts retention and coaches the team to accurately reflect account retention risks and develop account plans to mitigate.
- Monitors the team’s customer engagement activity and customer health indicators in Gainsight. Has on-going strategies and tactics for improving these metrics.
- Develops and deploys Customer Success best practices to support and align Planview strategies and initiatives with customer needs and desired business outcomes.
- Leads the team to proactively identify and exploit opportunities to increase Planview’s value-add across all portfolios.
- Represents the Voice of the Customer during Planview planning processes.
- Presents at Planview customer forums and notable industry conferences.
- Takes the lead on cross-functional corporate initiatives to improve customer value-propositions and overall experience with Planview.
- Effectively engages with critical stakeholders across the organization to enable an ongoing customer focus across Planview.
- Builds strong, trusted, and influential relationships with key strategic customers. Support senior management (CCO, VP, Director level) using analytics reports and dashboards for reporting to the Board.
- Develop staffing strategies. Recruit and hire staff. Supervise direct and functional reports. Establishes individual performance goals and priorities. Review performance against goals. Provide counseling. Plan, approve, and implement programs for the timely development and progress of each individual.
Qualifications
Desired Skills:
- Be obsessed with customer satisfaction, including the ability to identify business needs and opportunities for upsell, expansion and service improvement.
- Passionate about reaching out to and engaging with customers to ensure satisfaction with their Planview product experience.
- A balance of empathy for customers with a passion for revenue and growth for the company.
- Ability to manage a customer success team toward achieving business goals.
- Ability to develop clear understandings of customers’ needs and the ability to incorporate them into a solution.
- Highly self-motivated and self-directed.
- Ability to effectively prioritize and execute tasks.
Leadership Competencies:
- An experienced manager able to motivate their team to achieve the strategic objectives and goals of the Customer Success organization.
- Build and foster strong relationships with peers, cross functionally and with partners outside of team.
- Fast learner and able work ethically, effectively, and professionally under pressure.
- Create a learning environment, open to suggestions and experimentation for improvement.
- Ability to manage customer escalations with tact and diplomacy.
- Embraces the ideas of others to nurture innovation and operation excellence.
- Strong interpersonal, oral and written communications, skilled at effectively interacting with customers at all levels of customers’ and internal organization.
- Use of good judgment and a sense of urgency in the decision-making process when assessing problems/situations.
Additional Qualifications
- Minimum 5 years in a customer success/experience management role (2 years at Director level) preferred in PPM, PSA, or VSM.
- Bachelor’s degree preferred and/or equivalent relevant experience
- Proven results in improving customer satisfaction, customer retention, employee engagement, and team productivity
- Proven experience in creating a customer centric culture.
- Experience working in a fast-paced environment and consistently delivering projects on or before expected due dates.
- Skilled PowerPoint presenter to senior executives as well as customers.
- Located in the Southeast region preferred.
- This is a 100% remote position with the ability to travel 20% of time to company events and customer visits.