Customer Success Manager

The Company

Our mission is to make education affordable by helping institutions increase alumni giving. The idea started from our founders’ own struggle with the lack of scholarships when they were students. Watch this TEDx talk from Kalyan to learn more.

We are a bootstrapped company that has grown to be a leader in the alumni software space in the US. We’re slated for even faster growth on the path to becoming market leaders through a unique strategic partnership with Blackbaud (read more here & here)

Our customers are universities and high schools, and in most cases, we’re working with staff in the alumni relations and fundraising office at these institutions. The value prop for them at a high level is simple - “Engage more alumni and raise more money from them”. 90%+ of our customers are from the US currently, but we’re starting sales in the UK and Canada this year, so we’ll start to see some more customer regions this year. Our team is based in India and the USA. The India team is based in Bangalore and the US team is fully remote.

Almabase is looking to hire three Customer Success Managers to collaborate with customers and solve a range of use cases with the Almabase product.

Work Timing: Our customer base is mostly situated in the US. Therefore, you are expected to work during US hours: 8am to 5pm EST.

Work Location: We expect all team members to work from the Bangalore office. We follow a hybrid work policy, requiring you to work from the office at least 2 to 3 days per week.

Responsibilities

• KPIs: onboarding (CSAT and time to first value), account retention, Customer Health, revenue expansion, product adoption, and building advocates. (Retention is a shared accountability with the Account Manager, explained in more detail later)

• Accountable for the complete post-sales customer journey. (Onboarding → Adoption → Retention → Advocacy)

• Become the trusted advisor for each of your customers and help them achieve their alumni engagement and fundraising goals. Build and maintain strong relationships with the champion and other key stakeholders.

• Train customers on the product and leverage product workshops to ensure that they are equipped with knowledge about using Almabase.

• Collaborate with customers to solve various use cases using the Almabase product.

• Conduct regular check-ins & business reviews with your customers to ensure consistent engagement.

• Monitor customer health and risk score actively and devise a plan to move high-risk customers to low/medium risk. Collaborate with the Account Manager who will be responsible for the renewal of the accounts.

• Proactively identify opportunities for expansion and contact customers for up-sell/cross-sell.

• Collect NPS surveys from customers and enrich them, identifying customer insights and pain points. Contribute to the product roadmap by providing active feedback to the product team.

• Collaborate with the Marketing team to build customer case studies, testimonials, and referrals.

• Leverage AI to deliver better customer outcomes with less friction and enhance processes with AI to make them more efficient

An independent Customer Support team is responsible for responding to customers' questions while using the product. As a CSM, you are expected to be a strategic consultant to your portfolio of customers, helping them achieve their business outcomes with Almabase.

Requirements

• At least 1-2 years of SaaS B2B work experience in a CS related role such as CSM, Support, Onboarding, Customer Experience, etc. Experience working with US customers would be great.

• Comfortable with leveraging AI to improve CSM processes, using tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gamma, Canva, Zapier AI, N8N AI.

• Excellent written and verbal business communication skills.

• Ability to communicate and foster positive business relationships.

• Strong problem-solving skills, a technical and analytical aptitude, with the ability to quickly learn and adopt technical products.

• An ability to understand a software product and its nuances very well.

• Experience with customer success software or CRM (like HubSpot) would be helpful. We use HubSpot.
  

What will a typical quarter look like?

At the beginning of each quarter, we will work with you to come up with a set of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to work towards. This will help you focus.

• Onboarding: You will have customers who just signed up with Almabase, and you’ll be accountable for their onboarding. A separate implementation team will ensure the customer’s implementation is completed before handing it to you (CSM). You will ensure the customer is trained and that the program they intended to launch on Almabase is launched.

• Renewals: Renewals will be owned by the Account Manager. However, you as the CSM will own the risk score and health of the customer and collaborate with the Account Manager as they initiate the process of renewal for a customer. You are expected to supplement them with additional context of the customer, pain points if any, so that the Account Manager can better prepare the renewal conversation.

• Engagement: For onboarded customers, you will be responsible for engaging them through tailored strategies aligned with their goals and current product adoption. Your key focus areas will include maintaining and improving customer health, mapping customer workflows to Almabase, training POCs, conducting quarterly business reviews (QBRs), and driving greater product adoption and stickiness.

• Expansion: You will identify opportunities where a customer’s plan with Almabase can be expanded. If out of X, Y, and Z products of Almabase, a customer is only using X, then you will have discovery calls with the customer to determine their interest in Y and Z products. Once an intent is discovered, you will hand off the conversation to the Account Manager who will try to close the deal. Similarly, you will identify opportunities where a customer’s subscription tier can be upgraded.

• Building Advocates: Actively review your portfolio to identify opportunities for customers to become Almabase advocates. Some ways in which they could be advocates are helping us build case studies (marketing team), giving us referrals or acting as references for prospects (sales team), presenting with us at conferences, or reviewing us on listing websites.

• In addition to the above, you will also be involved with folks in the team or cross-functionally to improve our internal processes and help us do our day-to-day job better. For example, develop a playbook to drive more product adoption for a certain type of customer. These objectives help the entire function progress forward, not just your own portfolio of customers.

What will make you successful in this role?

• You need to understand the customer pain points and the market really deeply to be successful in this role.

• Being curious. Doing deep discovery to understand customer workflows and what they have hired Almabase for.

• Being curious about using AI and leveraging it intentionally in your day-to-day work.

• You need to have a deep understanding of our product to map the customer’s needs to specific parts of it. You will often have to screen share with the customer and help them set up something specific within the product.

• Building deeper relationships will go a long way in determining the experience of your customers with Almabase. As a customer success manager, you should care not just about how they use Almabase but also help them succeed in their individual roles in general.

• You need to be disciplined and good at multitasking. Since you’ll have multiple customers in your portfolio, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed.

• You need to care about the customers’ problems genuinely. That authenticity will help you form better relationships with the customers, which is critical to succeeding in this role.

How will we set you up for success in this role?

• We will provide you with detailed training to give you a head start in the world of alumni relations and educational fundraising. We’ll also talk about the competitive landscape and provide you access to hundreds of recorded conversations with existing customers and existing collateral. You can also dive into our CRM to see all prior customer conversations.

• We will provide you with in-depth training on our product and sandbox access to let you play around. The goal is for you to figure out how each piece helps solve a piece of the puzzle for customers.

• We will provide you with a playbook for how we currently manage customers. You are welcome to suggest improvements, but this will certainly give you a head start rather than starting from scratch.

• You will have plenty of opportunities to shadow calls where other CSMs are talking to their customers before taking your first call with a customer. We will shadow you on the first few calls to provide feedback.

• You will participate in a weekly standup with the entire customer success, onboarding, support & customer experience team to learn from each other and eliminate bottlenecks quickly. Apart from regular mentoring, you will also have a quarterly 1:1 review with your manager to discuss your career goals and overall success.

• We will provide you with access to the best customer success resources and add you to a few customer success communities so you can discuss with other people in similar roles—learn and teach at the same time. We’ve found that this is the fastest way to improve your skills.

• Most importantly, we will help you set up a one-on-one casual chat with every member of the Almabase team so you get to know everyone well.