Are You A Team Player
Yes! The answer is yes. Even though a customer service representative seems like a lone wolf type of job, it is not. There will be many times when you dont know how to help a customer, and you need help from your coworkers.
Tips
- Emphasize that you can work independently and that you are self-reliant. Most of the time, you will be working alone with the client. Your employer needs to know that youre comfortable with that and that you wont need supervision at all times.
- Try to balance your answer smack-bang in the middle of being too independent and being too indecisive.
- Research the company and whats important to them. Is it working independently or do they put more value into teamwork? Match what their preferences are.
Tell Me About A Time Where You Had To Make A Judgement Call On A Customer Question
While working as a customer service manager, there may be situations where the policy on a customer question or complaint isn’t clear or discernable. When that happens, potential employers sometimes like to know how you used your judgement and problem-solving skills to help the customer, while not causing a major inconvenience for the company itself.
Example answer:”I once had a customer call inquiring about their warranty policy because they dropped their product in a bucket of water and wanted to know if they were covered. I thoroughly reviewed the warranty policy, but couldn’t find anything that matched the situation they were describing. I wasn’t sure exactly what to do. Eventually, after talking with my manager, I decided to replace the customer’s product for free and our company tweaked the warranty policy to ensure that we knew how to respond to similar questions in the future.”
Have You Ever Initiated A Reward Program
The interviewer wants to know the type of reward you use to motivate your team
Tip #1: Mention any reward you initiated.
Tip #2: Talk about the outcome the rewards had on the team and work
Sample Answer
I started a written form of recognition with my employer. If an employee performed well, she will not only be mentioned in meetings but also an email recognizing the outstanding performance will be circulated among team members.
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Customer Success Manager Interview Questions
Customer success managers are essential to maintaining positive relationships with customers and ensuring customers use products and services to improve their business. When interviewing for these roles, hiring managers often look for a certain set of skills and experience that can show them how candidates might bring value to their organization. Learning about these needs and what to expect on these interviews can help you prepare for your next customer success interview.
In this article, we share 39 interview questions you might encounter, including ones about your background, experience and specific knowledge about the role.
Give Us A Customer Success Strategy Framework
The interviewer wants to know whether you have a strategy in your mind that you are supposed to use to make this field a success. Talk about the strategic framework for customer success.
I would say that the framework depends on the type of companys products. But there is a general and standard customer success methodology used to better the customer success field. The methodology involves
a) Brand awareness
These are the main methods that you can use to strategize customer success.
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Why Do You Want To Work In Customer Success
The ‘why’ behind a job or career choice is an important aspect of self-motivation. You want someone on your team who’s intrinsically motivated to help and advocate for others to achieve their goals and not just by external goals set by team management. Someone like this will be a positive example and leader on your team.
Ideal Answer:
“I really like to help people. I’ve always been a team player and I always feel a sense of accomplishment whenever I help others achieve their goals.”
12. How do you handle rejection?
People working in customer success might face as much rejection as salespeople. And it might even be tougher to bear after building a relationship with your customers, only for them to churn and leave for a competing product or service.
Ideal Answer:
“I always take failure as an opportunity to learn and improve myself for next time. If possible, I’ll ask for feedback or advice on where I can stand to improve. Then I apply that learning moving forward and move on to the next case.”
13. What skills are you hoping to develop in this role?
As with any position at your company, applicants should consider how they’ll develop in their role over time. They should be familiar with the skills needed to be a successful CSM and create a roadmap that will outline how they’ll acquire those abilities. During their response, pay attention to the skills they describe, as this will outline some of the candidate’s weaknesses.
Ideal Answer:
What Major Challenges Did You Face During Your Last Role How Did You Manage
The interviewer knows that at some point, you faced challenges. Thats what they expect you to talk about. Tell them about the challenges and how you managed them.
Sample Answer
Due to high customer expectations, sometimes the customers could find no value for their money in the product. This is a challenge that my previous company and I went through at our early stages. However, I realized that it is good to engage with your customers and tell them what to expect and what not to expect in the product. I must say that this was my biggest challenge, but I managed to solve it through the customer engagement program.
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Customer Success Manager Interview Questions To Ask Your Next Candidate
Access 100 additional customer success, service, and support interview questions.
One thing that makes customer success such an exciting field to be in is how multidisciplinary it is. It requires a mix of product knowledge, customer service skills, networking capability, and excellent communication abilities. Whats more, customer success managers need to learn about the industry of the customers they serve so they can capably answer questions and serve as a subject matter authority.
What makes customer success such an exciting space can also make it a challenging one when youre trying to build a team and hire new CSMs. With so many different skills and traits that make someone successful in a CSM role, what questions do you need to ask to figure out if theyll be a good fit?
To help out those are who are building and staffing a customer success team, weve put together some examples of questions to ask when hiring a customer success manager onto your team. Weve highlighted questions that help test for both the level of business acumen needed and personal skills, as well as some personality traits of the candidate.
But hiring a customer success manager can still be a difficult task — because the skills needed will depend on what service your company is providing and your business model.
How Would You Value A Saas Business With $100k In Recurring Revenue
Having a more engaging and interactive test case question in an interview process is so important because it allows you to see the candidate in action, and gives you the opportunity to test for team fit, problem-solving skills, and personality traits.
And this is a question that will help to not only test their level of business acumen, but also their level of awareness and honesty.
As far as personality, you will be able to see how this candidate handles stress. Are they willing to collaborate and ask further probing questions, or will they try to just come up with an answer on their own? If the candidate isnt completely sure of whats being asked, they should ask questions to make sure they are fully understanding the task at hand before diving in.
During the test and after youll be able to see how the person reacts — does the candidate seem to enjoy the challenge and task or do they become a bit grumpy being put on the spot?
This question will also give you an indicator of the candidates analytical skills. For example, there are some models that require some math, and there are certain cases where the valuation depends heavily on the product, other team members, the funding situation, etc. The way they reason the answer will show you their level of expertise in those areas.
The candidate should be willing to collaborate, ask questions when they need to, and should consider multiple valuation models and approaches.
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What Questions Would You Ask A Customer Success Manager
Here are the top ten interview questions you can ask Customer Success Manager candidates before your hire them.
To Check Customer Success understanding
What is Customer Success and why do companies need it? What will happen if we abolish the customer success department? And reverse what will happen if we have a great customer success team? How do onboard a customer?
To Check Empathy
The customer is about to cancel the contract because he/she is not able to do a task. But its actually possible to manage the task via the customer success software. What should we do? Who or what is at fault here? Product, Training, Support, Customer Success or Customer?
To Check domain knowledge
Say, you could only measure one thing to check if the customer was getting value from using the product. What would that be?
To Check ability to create a Strategy
What will be your strategy to manage a mix of accounts varying from a few thousands dollars to hundred thousands of dollars in annual recurring revenue?
To Check Time Management
How will you manage your day, week and month to Onboard new customers, retain existing customers, grow the portfolio and drive advocacy?
To check if they are comfortable with Data
In a portfolio of hundreds of accounts, how will you know which customer is about to churn? And which customers are going to upgrade?
To Check their comfort to shuffle tasks
You have a day packed with pre-planned Onboarding meetings. How will you handle an escalation from your key customer?
Is Customer Success A Philosophy Or Methodology How Would You Define It
Skill: Persuasive speaking
This question may seem slightly academic and pretentious. But a customer success specialist should be able to adapt to a variety of situations. If someone invites them to give a lecture on customer success at a reputable university, they should be able to handle it.
Example answer
Id lean towards philosophy. Its not just about the things you do. Its more about the way your whole company thinks about customers and their obligations to them. Obviously, these shape the attitudes of employees and approaches to the customer. In turn, it affects good practices and specific processes and procedures. But at the highest level, customer success is a state of mind.
What you should pay attention to as a candidate: Dont try to memorize complex definitions. Nobody will expect you to recite them. And its way too easy to get stuck if you forget specific wording. Youll get a better grasp of the terminology by reading articles about good customer service.
Extra follow-up question: What is the difference between customer success and customer service?
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Can You Walk Me Through How You Run Your Qbrs
Sometimes, customer success is about offering a high-touch engagement to selected accounts. Many SaaS companies offer an executive sponsorship program or quarterly business reviews to key accounts in order to demonstrate the value they are getting out of using your product.
And how well a CS team runs its QBRs says a lot about your commitment to the customers. A lot of young startups, for instance, might not even have a QBR process to begin with. But it becomes important once your company earns a few big-ticket clients who you want to retain for a lifetime.
The first Head of Customer Success should have QBRs as part of their account enrichment strategyâespecially if you are planning to move upmarket. A lot of mid-market and enterprise customers expect a white-glove service that can act as differentiation between you and your closest competitor.
This question is, therefore, important to understand if the candidate has experience handling mid-market and enterprise level accounts. An experienced Head of Customer Success will be able to walk you through their current process and give you the logic behind it. Youâll often clearly see the difference between the ones that have run QBRs and the ones that talk about it as a to-do.
All said, if they have a contradictory take about QBRs, thatâs an interesting proposition too. Hear them out and form your opinion based on the arguments they make against it.
Looking For A Customer Success Manager Try These Interview Questions
Being a hiring manager can feel foggy. People have left the workforce at record rates over the past year, and theyre not necessarily returning.
Good candidates are often scarce, especially in customer-facing capacities. And with employee retention a concern for any organization, accuracy is at a premium. Whether you have three candidates or 300, you simply cant afford mishires.
The good news? Behavioral data can help you identify the right fit for a role. When you know what behaviors will lead to success, you can hire with confidence.
To nail your CSM hire, youll need to look beyond just skills and resume. You want to focus on ideal workplace behaviors, and youll need to ask the right questions to ensure the person you choose will exhibit those behaviors.
Wondering how to hire a top-performing customer success manager? Start with questions that get right at the behaviors and competencies the role requires.
Lets say your behavioral target indicates this person should be extraverted, empathetic, and a good problem solver all while managing a growing roster of reports. Here are five questions you might ask to hone in on this target candidate:
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Interviewing A Customer Success Manager
As soon as youve written and multiposted your job ad across platforms the applications from qualified candidates will come streaming in. Congratulations!
Now its time to invite the first few applicants to an initial interview. Since the lucky person to join your team will have such a large impact on your business its of vital importance that you ask them the right Customer Success Manager interview questions. Thats why you need to ensure that you go into the interview prepared with great questions.
Below you can find a list of helpful interview questions . These questions are tailored to the Customer Success Manager role and help you determine whether the candidates possess the right skills and character traits.
Bear in mind, though, that these questions are suggestions for earlier stages of the interview process and for candidates with average work experience. Depending on the level of experience youre after these questions might be a little general.
Customer Success Manager Interview Tips
The following tips will help you to prepare effectively for your Customer Success Manager interview. Read and absorb each of the tips carefully before implementing them during your interview!
CSM INTERVIEW TIP #1
Read the job description very carefully and think of specific situations you have previously been in where you have demonstrated each aspect of the essential criteria. The hiring manager will be looking to see EVIDENCE of where you meet the criteria for this Customer Success Manager role.
CSM INTERVIEW TIP #2
When responding to situational or behavioural CSM interview questions, be sure to use the STAR method for structuring your answers. This involves preparing your response in the format of situation, task, action and result. Be sure to end your answer with a POSITIVE result for the greatest impact!
CSM INTERVIEW TIP #3
Be sure to research their company in detail before you attend the interview. You will have to answer the common Customer Success Manager interview question, why do you want to work for our company early on during your interview.
CSM INTERVIEW TIP #4
The most effective way to get ready for your interview is to prepare answers to all of the twenty-seven questions listed on this page. Whilst this is a lot of work to undertake, by doing so you will undoubtedly be the best prepared candidate on the day!
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Interview Questions To Ask When Hiring A Csm
These behavioral interview questions can quickly confirm or deny your hunches. Theyre designed to help answer a crucial question: Is this person who we think they are?
And since youve already identified your job target, a simple yes can dramatically reduce your time to hire.
Tell Me About A Time You Exceeded Customer Expectations
It can be helpful for businesses to know how hard you’ll work to make their consumers happy and improve overall customer satisfaction. This can show companies how you can use your knowledge and techniques to benefit their own organization. When answering this question, consider discussing your role in exceeding customer expectations and the positive results it had for your employer.
Example answer:”As I was working for my previous employer, I had a customer call me who purchased one of the company’s products, but discovered the product wasn’t helping them like they thought. They were asking to return the product for a refund. Unfortunately, our policy doesn’t allow for returns after a product’s use, which made her quite unhappy.
So, instead, I inquired more about what she was looking for in our products. She told me about her problems and I found a different product I thought would help her. I shipped it to her for free and told if her it didn’t work, I’d fulfill her request for a return. She called me back a few days later and said the product was amazing and helped her exactly like she hoped. She was very pleased.”
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