Customer Success Leader 

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centred on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. Growth mindset encourages each of us to lean in and learn what matters most to our customers, to create the foundational knowledge that enables us to make customer-first decisions in everything we do. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us achieve our mission  

  

Do you always strive to learn? Are you insatiably curious and do you lean into uncertainty, take risks, and learn quickly from your mistakes? Do you share and build on other’s ideas because we are better together? Do you stand in awe of what humans dare to achieve, and are you motivated every day to empower others to do more and achieve more through our technology and innovation? Are you ready to join the team that is at the leading edge of Innovation at Microsoft? Then come to Microsoft - Together we make a difference.  

 

About the Customer Success Unit (CSU):  

 
The CSU at Microsoft aspires to help our customers achieve their own digital transformation, leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud solutions and support offerings. Microsoft invests in a dedicated Customer Success team that will help our customers successfully realise their business outcomes.  

Pivotal to the CSU customer support is the role of Customer Success Account Manager (CSAM). The CSAM is a key delivery customer facing role responsible for the leadership and orchestration of a virtual team, management of program deliveries and senior customer relationships and to drive the successful adoption and productive use of Microsoft’s cloud technologies within the customer.  

As a Customer Success Leader your role is to directly manage, support and guide a team of CSAM’s in specific industry alignment, while holding direct relationships with Snr Exec customer stake holders and also collaborating with your Microsoft account teams and manager peer community. â€¯â€¯â€¯â€¯ 

 We will bring to you:   

A culture where you can ‘come as you are and do what you love’ - The people at Microsoft are what makes Microsoft great, as we are employees representing communities and cultures of the world coming together to help others achieve more. 

A welcoming and inclusive hybrid-working environment where everyone's voice is heard! The enduring evolution of the Customer Success role invites you bring your creative input to help shape the future of our Connected Customer Experience. We create an environment where you can do your best work, learn constantly and build a career both in the Customer Success Unit as well as the wider Microsoft. As your interests and goals evolve we will enable you to connect you with a diverse, thriving community that can help you grow.

Responsibilities

Who Are We Looking For? 

We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate leader to drive a team and a portfolio of accounts with a significant amount of cross-functional cloud services which enables cloud adoption for our customers’ cloud engagements. 

• Experience: experience in either/or technical sales, consultative or program delivery. The ability to demonstrate capability in managing complex projects and support engagements. 
• Management: Extensive experience in people management, financial and /or product consumption and utilisation management. The ability to demonstrate exceptional cross-team collaboration and effective communication at varying levels internally and externally. 
• Change: Experience in driving change management or technical adoption. 

• Collaboration: Ability to generate trust, build alliances, and orchestrate interdisciplinary teams to the benefit of customers. 
• Communication: Thought leader with executive presence, including the ability to hold CxO and BDM level discussions, exceptional interpersonal, verbal, written and presentation skills required. 

Technical acumen to lead a team by demonstrating: 

• Understanding of Enterprise cloud workloads and high level technical solutions. 

• Ability to stay up to date on new/improved cross cloud scenarios and workloads. 
• Empathy, curiosity, the desire to constantly improve, acquire new skills and drive for results. 
• Leadership through technical, consultative or program delivery, coaching or leadership roles. 

Responsibilities & Objectives: 

As a member of the Customer Success Account Management Team, you will lead high-performing team of seasoned Customer Success Account Managers (CSAMs) that are well versed in cloud adoption, program delivery management practices, and technology trends.  This is an exciting role that will help fuel customer success through your leadership with business, customer, and team growth. 

The Customer Success Leader is responsible for driving customer satisfaction, customer effective use of Microsoft’s cloud platforms, consumption, growth with fulfilling Support contractual obligations, and the governance of delivery for their portfolio of accounts led by their CSAMs. 

• Hire, on-board, develop, coach, mentor and evaluate a diverse group of Customer Success Account Managers. 
• Set a clear bar for excellence to build a high performing team that is diverse and inclusive. 
• Partner with all required Microsoft stakeholders to drive CSAM role clarity, account coverage, project assignment, role evolution and effective cross-team collaboration. 
• Own and drive collaborative and impactful relationships with the Sales and Technical sectors as well as Snr Execs within Microsoft to ensure a joint strategic approach to customer relationships and desired outcomes 
• Coach and enable the team to accelerate cross cloud workload projects to production, including technical readiness, blocker escalations and technical resource orchestration 

• Share best practice in account approach and solutions across sector industry. Implement best practice from peer teams  
• Ensure the team delivers high quality production deployments that are resilient and successful, and include post-delivery lessons learnt for ongoing improvement. 
• Drive operational excellence, including timely consumption opportunity management, high-quality reporting and insights, and delivery portfolio health. 

 
You will: 

• Collaborate and manage your teams customer success plans to help customers achieve their strategic objectives.  

• Partner with the account team to build long-term customer relationships, across all business functions within the customer organisation.  
• Engage and strengthen relationships with key Exec customer decision makers / sponsors / influencers to align delivery priorities in support of their strategy.  
• Proactively review customer consumption and health scores to derive actionable insights to help your team and customers optimize their Microsoft investment.   
• Be jointly accountable for your team’s end-to-end delivery plans to drive customer success, operational health and digital transformation. 
• Oversee projects, and engagements in-pipeline, in-progress to successful closure by removing blockers, managing dependencies, risks and impact to secure successful delivery of the program, project and engagement. 

Qualifications

You will bring to us: 

We welcome applications from individuals who have a wide range of experiences and backgrounds. Successful candidates would benefit from: - 

• Formal qualifications or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or related field would be preferred. 
• PMP or other project management certification is preferred. 
• Certification in one or more of the following technologies is preferred: Cloud, Database, Big Data, BI, Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence. 
• A love of people management, a track record of providing leadership, mentoring, guidance and orchestration of an internal delivery team. 

• A passion for technology, driving customer value, strategic outcomes, while working with the best people in the industry.  
• A growth mindset to be a part of an elite team of diverse individuals focused on making our customers successful. 
• A proven ability to partner with account teams to build and retain customer relationships, across business and technical functions within their organisation.  
• Demonstrable experience of driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts, communicating successfully and being able to present confidently to large or small audiences including C-Level Executives.   
• Active and creative participation in shaping the future of the Microsoft Customer Success community.   

• Demonstrable experience  working in a customer-facing role, e.g. Customer Success, Account Management or Service Delivery.  
• Exceptional communication, presentation, and facilitation skills.  
• Demonstrable accountability, customer advocacy, conflict resolution, growth mindset, stakeholder influence, ability to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders and all levels of management.   
• An ability to multi-task and work in a dynamic environment with constant change to address emerging issues and challenges.     
• An insatiable appetite for learning, curious, communicative, optimistic attitude, empathetic, displaying emotional intelligent.  

• A willingness and ability to travel (national) when required: 0-30%.