Vice President of Customer Success

Vice President of Customer Success

The Vice President is the figurehead of the Customer success, Professional Services, and Solutions Architect team. They bring your strategies in motion and provide an ingenious approach to lead the customer-interactive teams in your company.
The Vice president reports to the Chief Revenue Officer. The Customer Success managers report to the Vice President.
The hierarchy goes like:

• Chief Executive Officer
• Chief Revenue Officer
• Vice President of Customer Success
• Customer Success Manager   Customer Onboarding Manager

Things a Vice President needs to be familiar with:

1. Understanding your team. This mantra applies to any management job. You have to hold on closely with each person or leader, if your team is big enough. You have to establish a relationship with them and understand their abilities and area of expertise. You need to know what drives their daily assignment, how much time they are spending, and on what.
2. Have a Segmentation Strategy. Segmentation strategy organizes your customer base into Demographic (the “WHO”), Geographic (the “WHERE”), Behavioral (the “NOW”), or Psychographic (the “WHY”), or a combination of them. In a nutshell, its is a strategy to break down a big customer base into smaller and manageable groups.
   a) Demographic targets towards age, gender, income, level of education, etc.
   b) Geographic, as the name suggests, divides as per the Country, region, city, postal code, etc.
   c) Behavioral is the group that contains customer on the basis of spending habits, purchasing habits, loyalty to the brand, product ratings, etc.
   d) Psychographic portrays personality traits, lifestyle, hobbies, goals, etc.
   OR
   The other set of variables for determination can be:
   a) Contract Value: sort them on the basis of how much they are paying you.   Treat the larger ones with more attention and be more adaptable to the ones who are paying less.
   b) Annual recurring revenue potential: Put the customers with more annual value on the top tier.
3. Build an Engagement Strategy. Now that you have your segments made, it is now time to implement them. You can break your team into the parts according to the segments and give them the task of treating each customer in accordance with their respective segment. Map out the engagement models for the most effective segments first. See to it that each segment has met its own financial sense. This will allow you to have a clear vision of your plan and help you to lay it out in front of your Chief Revenue Officer.

What are the qualifications required to be opted for a Vice President?

• Should have an open heart for customers.
• Should have some experience as a Customer Success manager 
• Should have a bold strategic vision for the customer experience and customer support.
• Should be willing to engage directly with the customers.
• Should have the leadership qualities to motivate his/her teams.
• Should be work driven and a precise decision maker, with an enthusiasm to experiment.
• Should have spotless communication skills.

What are the responsibilities of a Vice President?

• Should have an early detection on at-risk customers. Prioritizing the customers that are most likely to churn is very important.
• Should have triggers on the set milestones. This is for the period when the renewals are to be made by the customers and you are alerted some days before it to have a track of your annual business review.
• Have an intel on the survey scores. This will help you to utilize your resources appropriately.
• Have a file made on each customer so as to when it is needed by you CEO, the CSMs will not have to hunt down for them.
• You speak for the customers. The transparency between the customers and the company depends upon you, and it is your job to make sure that the transparency is maintained.
• You have to constantly remind the company that you are a CS driven platform, and the health of the customers matters a lot to you.
• You have to influence all the other organization for a smooth functioning of the company. If the customers cannot achieve their use case, you need to pay attention to the CSMs and the onboarding team. If the product expectations are not met, the attention then diverts to the sales, this complete upper hand on the teams is very important to keep the rust at bay.