The Customer Success Manager (CSM) is a pivotal role that focuses on sustaining long-term customer satisfaction, loyalty, and thereby recurring revenue. The role was originally created by the CRM Company Vantive, which used to bring in customer success reps to build long-term relationships with prospects before a deal was finalized. The CSM would be their internal contact tasked with building relationships, understanding the customer's needs, and ensuring that the client reaches their goals with the company's products or services. And, this is where a customer success manager differs from customer service. While customer service is tasked with reacting to customer's issues- the customer success manager proactively prevents them- enhancing the customer experience (CX).

The role of CSM involves close interaction with customers, guiding them through each step of the customer journey from deal signing and onboarding to adoption, strategic upsells, and renewals. This means that the CSM serves as the bridge between the customer and the company, advocating for the customer's needs and strategically positioning products and services to support customer retention rates.

Unfortunately, when it comes to finding a great customer success manager there's no one-size-fits-all approach. But there are a few common traits that you may want to be mindful of. First and foremost, the best customer success managers actually like people. I know it sounds weird to start off with this, but CSMs must have the ability to build deep, trust-based relationships with people or they won't succeed. Next, they need to be curious. Getting to the bottom of a problem often requires a deep curiosity, active listening, and layers of questions to get to the root. Great CSMs also need to have a solid grasp of quarterly objectives, the industry, product, and customer challenges. Therefore, when hiring for this role, the key is to look for individuals who not only understand the industry and the importance of customer retention but are also capable of contributing to the business's long-term goals and objectives.

Interviewing a customer success manager is also a bit unique. This role demands a balanced combination of highly technical knowledge and deep interpersonal skills. Finding a CSM with both the hard and soft skills to enroll customers in the long-term vision of the company is critical. Because of this, customer success manager interview questions often encompass a wide range of topics, from general interview questions for customer success managers (CSMs) that assess behavioral and communication skills to more specific interview questions for customer success manager roles that gauge a candidate's ability to strategize and problem-solve in real-time.

Crafting the right interview questions will give you a significant advantage. We prefer a structured interview approach and a balance of behavioral and situational interview questions to understand how the candidate has handled challenges in the past and give them scenarios to work through that would accurately reflect situations they may face in the role. If you'd like to see how structured interviews work and have our AI-questions generator create an entire interview guide with questions for you, click here, paste your job description into the text field, and in less than 5 minutes we'll email you a personalized guide. This is one of the many tools our customers use in conjunction with interview intelligence software to make interviews simple.

Customer Success Manager Interview Questions With Answers

As we mentioned in the previous section, the CSM interview process is as much about the candidate's ability to showcase their interpersonal skills as it is a demonstration of their technical competencies. Creating scenario-based mock renewal calls and customer success manager interview presentations will give you an idea of their ability to upsell and handle objections. This will also allow them to showcase their understanding of customer lifecycle management, and how they plan to foster long-lasting customer relationships. Use this skills test to assess their ability to strategically think through case studies or hypothetical scenarios, showcasing how they would handle real-world challenges to ensure customer success and drive growth.

Once your questions have been asked, it's time to assess their responses. Customer success manager interview questions with answers offer the recruiter, HR team, or hiring manager to set hiring criteria that are standardized for all candidates and assess their responses comparatively with those of other candidates. Seeking to uncover insights into the candidate's thought process, problem-solving approach, and how they prioritize the customer's needs while aligning with the company's objectives. A great example of this would be the common question: "Describe a time when you turned a dissatisfied customer who was looking to cancel their subscription into a loyal advocate and renewal." This will allow the interviewer to gauge the candidate's ability to manage difficult situations, understand customer pain points, and effectively communicate how they navigated the issue to a positive resolution.

9 Common Questions for a Customer Success Manager Interview:

1. Can you share a specific instance where you identified a potential customer issue before it escalated and how you addressed it?
2. How do you approach setting and managing customer expectations for a product or service that is constantly evolving?
3. Describe a situation where you had to use both your technical knowledge and customer service skills to solve a customer’s problem.
4. What strategies would you employ to learn about a new product or service in order to effectively support and sell it to customers?
5. How do you prioritize your tasks and manage your time when you have multiple customers needing your attention simultaneously?
6. Can you walk us through how you build and maintain long-term relationships with your clients, especially those who may not immediately see the value of your product or service?
7. Tell us about a time when you had to handle a difficult or unhappy customer. How did you turn the situation around and ensure their satisfaction?
8. How do you keep up-to-date on industry trends and changes that may affect your customers?
9. Can you give an example of how you have collaborated with cross-functional teams to drive customer success and retention?

By using interview intelligence software, you can assess not just their responses but also their tonal changes, inflections, and micro-expressions human eyes often miss. You can also use the power of artificial intelligence to assess the candidate's skills in an objective way. Making your interviews fair and equitable.

Tech & SaaS Industry-Specific Questions

As we turn our attention to the specific needs of tech and SaaS (Software as a Service) customer success teams, the two most important items to keep in mind are the business model and the product. Unlike many other industries that make a profit when an item is sold, SaaS and tech amortize development costs and margins over time, often requiring customers to stay much longer for a company to be profitable. This necessitates a distinct set of SaaS customer success manager interview questions to ensure that the CSM is familiar with the model and understands the company's growth requirements.

Next, you'll want to assess their technical ability to understand the customer's challenges and align products and services from your portfolio to solve them. Technical customer success manager interview questions might explore a candidate’s ability to grasp a complex security requirement or set of software functionalities and convey them to clients of varying technical proficiency. Technical CSM questions like, “Can you explain a time when you had to demystify a sophisticated software update to a non-technical customer?” or “How do you stay updated on the latest industry trends and technical advancements to better serve your clients?” will help determine a candidate's level of comfort with technology and their ability to translate it for customers.

As we move up a level to the senior CSMs, the focus of the interview will shift more toward leadership and strategic vision. Senior customer success manager interview questions and answers should assess aspects of building culture and community on a team, mentorship and goal setting, leadership, and communication. Hitting goals on a team is as much about morale as it is about financial incentives- and a Senior CSM must be able to deliver both to be successful. Great questions on the topic could be, “Describe how you would lead a customer success team through a major product pivot.” Or, “How do you keep your Customer Success team engaged and motivated during challenging times?”

Lastly, when we talk about "vision" and "culture," we're assessing someone's ability to buy into the bigger picture even in the face of opposition. This means being tapped into industry trends, innovation, competitor products, and shifts in the space. Tech and SaaS industry-specific questions could probe how candidates stay ahead of developments and understand their impact on customer strategies and business objectives. For example, “How do you collect actionable insights from customer interactions or publications and use them to inform product development and overall company strategy?” or “How do you anticipate and address potential issues with a new product launch before they become major roadblocks for customers?”

In closing, selecting the right Customer Success Manager for your company involves a comprehensive evaluation. If you include hard and soft skills in your assessments, as well as mock conversations that match your customer's journey, you'll be able to assess their performance in real time. Using interview intelligence will also help you make better hiring decisions. If you'd like to see how, book a demo of Pillar today!