Customer success encompasses all aspects of business that have aspirational goals in growth and retention. It is of the essence for the CSM to ensure satisfaction or desired outcomes either from the product or service being rendered to the customer. On the other hand, hiring the right customer success team will help organizations maintain strong relationships with clients. In this article, we will show what main skills a customer success manager should master, how to check for these skills during recruitment, and how to develop customer success skills within your team.
- What Are Customer Success Manager Skills?
- How to Conduct A Customer Success Skills Assessment Online?
- How to Improve Customer Success Skills of Employees in Your Team?
What Are Customer Success Manager Skills?
Customer success requires an intimate combination of interpersonal, technical, and problem-solving skills. The key skills that a successful customer success manager is bound to possess are enlisted in the following:
Communication skills
The CSM should be a good communicator: written and verbal. Clear, concise communication helps the CSMs to build their relationships with the customers, to explain some features, and to resolve issues effectively. Equally important will be listening to clearly understand what the customer is saying about their needs and concerns.
Empathy
Customer success is all about the experience of the customer, and empathy goes a long way in trying to understand their pain points and working to resolve them. An empathetic CSM can understand frustrations from the customer’s perspective and offer solutions that meet particular needs.
Problem-solving and critical thinking
CSMs often have to resolve customer complaints, troubleshoot issues, or help customers achieve success with a product. Strong problem-solving skills enable the CSM to find solutions faster and more efficiently for customer satisfaction.
Product knowledge
Any customer success manager has to have deep product or service knowledge. CSMs should be able to point customers in the right direction toward maximizing the product and provide informed counsel when problems arise.
Relationship management
With any CSM, the continuous development of relationships is often the key responsibility, in building or maintaining a relationship with valued customers. This skill inculcates the art of managing the expectations and satisfaction of customers and subsequently generating loyalty among them over time.
Analytical skills
A CSM should be able to leverage data on customers to track their success in pursuit of understanding their needs and identifying those who run the risk of churning. It enhances the customer experience and shapes future engagement strategies.
How to Conduct A Customer Success Skills Assessment Online?
A properly constructed test will help you find out if indeed you are hiring the best candidate for the customer success role. Here’s how you perform a customer success skills assessment online.
Create Your Next Quiz/Exam with OnlineExamMaker
Step 1: Prepare assessment questions
Multiple-choice questions, scenario-based, and short-answer questions can be done on a platform such as OnlineExamMaker. You can have a scenario where the candidate needs to solve an issue for a customer or explain how they will onboard a new customer.
If you want to create customer success test questions using AI, just try OnlineExamMaker AI Question Generator. Launch the AI tool, then input topics about custom success to create questions automatically.
Step 2: Incorporate role-play or simulation tasks
For the latter part, add a practical test-simulation-a candidate must communicate with a virtual client. This way, you will be able to review how his or her communication and problem-solving skills, as well as his or her capability for empathy, work in real-time.
Step 3: Create a new assessment
In OnlineExamMaker dashboard, press “New exam” button to create a new assessment. In this step, you can personalized assessment title, add keywords, edit assessment description, and add an image as cover.
Step 4: Customized assessment settings
You can often customize the look and feel of your assessment by selecting themes, adjusting colors, and adding brand logos. Moreover, you are able to customized quiz time, registration form, pre-assign grades or scores for correct answers while adding the questions.
Step 5: Review scores and the analyze result
You can share the customer success skills assessment to candidates after you release the exam. Once the test is complete, OnlineExamMaker instantly grades the answers for you, freeing up more of your time and immediately generating detailed reports. These will enable you to go over the candidate’s strengths and areas where the candidate needs further practice.
How to Improve Customer Success Skills of Employees in Your Team?
The following are some of the strategies you can adapt to make sure customer success skills keep improving in your team.
Offer regular training and development
Regular training in product knowledge, customer communication, and problem-solving is important. Run regular workshops and webinars that will keep your team updated with new features, best practices, and the changing needs of customers.
Encourage mentoring and peer learning
Pair less experienced team members with senior customer success managers to drive mentorship. This allows for knowledge sharing and further helps in enhancing the interpersonal skills of the team members.
Pro Tip
You can build engaging online customer success assessments with our free online assessment maker.
Use customer feedback for improvement
Collect customer feedback regularly to understand where your team needs to improve. Use these to share with the rest of the team, thereby instilling a culture of improvement among them.
Promote empathy training
Empathy is a core skill in customer success, and one can avail more specific training in regard to understanding the emotions of the customers and how to respond to their needs with care and understanding. This will improve customer satisfaction and retention.
Customer success lies at the heart of any strong, long-term customer relationship, and of course, it requires a certain skill set to effectively do this job. An online structured assessment, such as those created on OnlineExamMaker, would assure you that you will hire the right people who will help toward customer satisfaction and business growth. Ongoing training and support to your team will also help develop their skills over time. OnlineExamMaker allows you to create your tailored assessment, provides automatic grading, and carves out valuable insights to assist you in your endeavor to hire and retain the best talent in customer success.
