The Chief Customer Officer will serve a critical role for the firm – leading the company’s delivery of a more seamless and impactful end-to-end journey for Company’s customers, ensuring they experience the full value of their solutions. Closely tied to this objective is achievement of Company’s top-line revenue and profit margin goals.
Customer success and the efficient internal investments and operations that enable it are vital to our long-term growth and profitability. We will not be successful unless our customers are receiving excess value from our service and the right new customers continue to purchase and grow.
This role focuses on leading a cross-functional Customer Success Group, optimizing Company’s net retention as well as influencing targeted new logo sales efforts through deep client empathy, analytical rigor, a practical understanding of client value delivery, client service and support operations in a recurring revenue business, technology to enable customer success, and financial acumen to impact our KPIs such as Last Twelve Months Annual Net Retention, Cost to Serve, and Lifetime Value of our customer relationships, among others.
This role will report directly to the Chief Revenue Officer, and serve as a member of the firm’s Senior Leadership Team – ensuring cross-functional alignment and delivery in successful customer outcomes and sustainable company growth.
The role will have reporting to them the Customer Support and at-scale Customer Success teams, as well as leadership of a cross-functional working group. Success in this role will involve both strong individual execution in terms of analysis, proposals, and implementation, as well as inspiring the team to produce the desired commercial outcomes.
Lastly, success in this role involves building strong relationships with other leaders on the Executive team and across departments in order to collaboratively develop the right analyses, strategies and processes that successfully support our clients’ success and the firm’s commercial results.
About Company
Our mission is to help our clients identify challenges and provide innovative, data-driven, and practical solutions to better navigate risk, opportunity, and uncertainty. We leverage our platform of software and information-services products to empower people and organizations with the right information at the right time. Companyr’s, both experienced and new professionals, gain opportunities for learning and professional development in a diverse and innovative culture, rooted in our company values and mission. Our headquarters, located in downtown Washington D.C., champions our culture through a vibrant, modern, open-concept that still offers privacy, fostering collaboration and success. Our team is committed to being a good neighbor, woven into the fabric of the DC-metro area community, and continually looking for new opportunities to support our neighbors.
What to Expect in this Role:
- • Drive Customer Success Outcomes – Increase renewal rates and expand our revenue in accounts by gross-retention, upsell and cross-sell. Last Twelve Months Net Retention is your central focus. Influence future lifetime value through higher product adoption, customer satisfaction and overall health scores. Drive new business growth through greater customer advocacy and reference-ability
- • Define and Optimize Customer Lifecycle – Map the customer journey and develop listening points in journey (e.g., usage, satisfaction, etc.). Develop KPIS and standardize interventions for each point in the journey. Define segmentation of customer base and varying strategies. Identify opportunities for continuous improvement. Learn from and implement best practices in industry.
- • Measure Effectiveness of Customer Success – Define operational metrics for the firm. Establish a system for tracking metrics. Create cadence for review within the executive team.
- • Lead World-class Customer Support and Success team – Attract and engage high performing individual contributors and managers into the team. Foster collaboration across the commercial teams and across the customer lifecycle and encourage continuous learning within the team.
- • Enhance Effectiveness and Efficiency Through Technology – Oversee selection, deployment, and ROI of technology services.
- • Inspire Customer Success Across Company – Foster a company-wide culture of Customer Success. Align with Marketing around current marketing to existing clients. Align with Product on high-impact product roadmap. Inform and influence new sales with a long-term net-retention focus. l Align with Finance around measurement and forecasting. Align with the Commercial Management Team around key metrics and objectives. And drive the company-wide definition of ideal customer and create a company-wide customer feedback loop.
- • Optimize available tools – Recommend and implement key tools to increase Customer Success. Ensure hands-on coaching/training on using our Client Support and Success tech stack. Ensure workflow / automation to reduce administrative tasks for the client-facing teams.
What Sets You Apart:
- • 15+ years’ experience in customer success roles in a high-growth, SaaS and/or information services environment
- • An ability to engage in self-directed, hands on knowledge gathering to quickly develop a detailed understanding of Company’s product and service offerings.
- • Strong background in understanding how to optimize customer support platforms, customer usage, customer support and sales and marketing data architecture
- • Proven ability to lead teams and work effectively with senior executives and cross-functional teams with data, practical customer-facing know-how, and consensus building
- • Strong empathy for customers AND passion for revenue and growth
- • Deep understanding of value drivers in recurring revenue business models
- • Analytical and process-oriented mindset
- • Practical, hands-on analytical capabilities and a willingness to roll-up your sleeves.
- • Demonstrated desire for continuous learning and improvement
- • Enthusiastic and creative leader with the ability to inspire others
- • Ability to work across cultures and time zones.