Customer Success Manager: Duties, Pay, and How to Become One

Customer success managers work directly with customers following their purchase of a product or good in order to ensure it meets their needs. In other words, they work to nurture long-term customer relationships by ensuring customers are happy with their purchases and supporting them throughout their post-purchase customer journey.

Customer success managers are integral to the success of a company's sales and customer satisfaction goals. In this article, you'll learn more about customer success managers, including what they do, how much they earn, and how to become one. At the end, you'll even explore flexible resources that can help you gain job-relevant skills today.

What is a customer success manager?

A customer success manager (CSM) is a professional who ensures customer success and satisfaction with a good or service following its purchase from a business. Rather than focusing on the initial sale of the product or service, a customer success manager is primarily concerned with building long-term relationships with customers by helping them use their purchase in the best possible way for their needs.

According to research published by Statista, the top issues impacting the customer journey include ease of problem resolution, ineffective use of customer data, poor omnichannel experience, and delayed contact between a customer and a business [1]. Customer success managers help resolve some of these problems by onboarding new customers, helping them resolve problems with the purchased product, upselling new goods or services that might better meet their needs, and managing renewals of services.

Other titles to know

Customer success managers are sometimes also called "client success managers" or "customer service managers." Regardless of the title, though, you can expect them all to be abbreviated as CSM.

What does a customer success manager do?

Customer success managers build customer loyalty by ensuring that customers have a positive experience with the company.

While working in this managerial position, you may be responsible for ensuring a positive relationship with customers, managing customer satisfaction, and using customer service data to set and enforce customer service goals for the company. Important tasks might include:

• Managing interactions between customers and the company

• Acting as a sales guide for customer-facing employees

• Guiding new and existing customers through the sales funnel

• Fostering customer retention by ensuring a smooth customer journey

• Training employees on how to provide customer assistance

• Managing a sales or customer support team

• Collecting and analyzing data to improve customer service health

Learn more about the everyday tasks of a CSM from industry leaders at Salesforce:

Customer success manager salary

Customer success managers are critical to ensuring customers are happy and that customers achieve their overall business goals. And as a result, they're well-compensated for their efforts.

According to Glassdoor, the average base salary customer success managers earn is $74,015 as of July 2023 [2]. Furthermore, they earn an average of $21,564 in additional pay, which may result from commission, cash bonuses, tips, and profit sharing.

Because many customer success managers work on commission in addition to a base salary, the types of goods or services sold can also greatly affect their income.  

How to become a customer success manager

Customer success managers need to have a strong understanding of a business's products and services, as well as possess strong customer service skills. Handling such an important aspect of a business means that most employers prefer candidates with the right education, experience, and skills.

Here's what you can expect to do on the path to becoming a customer success manager:

1. Get your degree.

In order to qualify for most customer success manager positions, you'll need to have a bachelor's degree. According to Zippia, 77.5 percent of customer success managers have a bachelor's degree, 12.3 percent have a master's degree, and only 6.9 percent have an associate degree [3]. Top majors include business, marketing, communication, and political science.

2. Gain relevant work experience.

In order to become a customer success manager, you'll need to gain relevant work experience that prepares you for the job. In fact, according to Zippia, most employers ask that job applicants have between 4 and 6 years of work experience in a field related to the position, such as sales or marketing [3]. Some jobs you might consider pursuing in order to gain relevant work experience include customer service representative, sales associate, project manager, and account manager [4].  

3. Develop the right skills.

The most effective managers have the ability to employ certain technical and people skills every day. Some of the skills you can expect to use as a customer success manager include: 

Read more: Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills: What’s the Difference?

4. Apply, apply, apply.

Once you have the required training, work experience, and skills, you're ready to be a customer success manager. Explore existing positions at your current place of work and elsewhere, focusing on areas you may have specialized in former positions. It can often take time to land a job, but by preparing appropriately and being proactive, you can do it.

Read more: Job Search Guide: Resources for Your Next Career Move

5. Consider further career advancement. 

As a customer success manager, you may choose to move into other management roles or change departments.

Most customer success managers follow the sales or marketing pathway within a company. This means that a customer success manager may step into the role of manager of other customer success managers, account executive/account manager, product sales/marketing manager, product management, or enterprise customer success manager. 

You may find yourself on the pathway to positions like vice president of sales or chief customer officer (CCO) if you stay with a company for a while and gain success and experience in your roles. 

Get started with Coursera

Take the next step toward a career as a customer success manager by building your customer service and leadership skills now.

In Salesforce's Sales Operations Professional Certificate, you'll learn how to build reports, charts, and dashboards in Salesforce to communicate relevant information about sales performance to stakeholders and executives.

Through the University of Michigan's Leading People and Teams Specialization, meanwhile, you'll use the Michigan Model of Leadership to define organizational goals and learn how to manage talent to improve employee performance, development, and retention.