The Customer Success Manager is a role that’s equal parts strategist, wilderness guide, and problem-solver. They act as a mentor to customers, educating them on how to get the most value out of their purchase.
Behind the scenes of today’s most successful companies you’ll find Customer Success Managers pulling the strings—building relationships, solving problems before they happen, and turning first-time users into loyal brand ambassadors.
If you love connecting with people, helping them succeed, and being at the heart of the action, this role could be your dream job.
Whether it’s working with clients across the globe, helping shape products from the inside out, or enjoying the flexibility of remote work and international teams, becoming a CSM opens doors to exciting opportunities.
According to Glassdoor and LinkedIn, demand for CSMs continues to grow, and the median base salary hovers around $75,000 annually, with potential to exceed six figures at senior levels.
In this article, we’ll go over the day-to-day of this role and discuss how you can become a customer success manager, including how to get the qualifications and experience you need.
We’ll also share the soft and hard skills you’ll need to be successful in this role, bringing key insights from an EHL alumna who works in this field.
What Is a Customer Success Manager ?
Think of a Customer Success Manager as the official guide of the customer journey—part trailblazer, part trusted companion—they lead clients through the landscape of a product or service.
They're not just there to put out fires; they light the path forward, helping clients unlock value at every turn. From the moment a deal is signed, CSMs step in to welcome, educate, and empower, ensuring the relationship doesn’t just survive—it thrives. Their mission is to make satisfied clients into lifelong fans.
At Adobe, my role focuses on helping clients realize the value of the products they have purchased. I work with clients to ensure they adopt Adobe products effectively and help them get the most out of their investment. This is not a sales role but rather a post-sales account management role, where I work closely with clients to align their needs with the product features.
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Iris Tournier-Chen, (EHL’12) Senior Customer Success Manager at Adobe
Key Responsibilities
Wondering what a day in the life of a Customer Success Manager looks like? Here’s a sneak peek at what they do to keep clients happy and thriving:
👋 Welcome aboard! You’ll kick things off by onboarding new clients—making sure they feel confident, informed, and excited to get started.
📚 Teach & empower. From product walkthroughs to best-practice tips, you’ll guide users to become proficient and make the best use of their newly acquired product or service. You play a key role in developing and offering training tailored to clients’ needs and provide demos, tutorials, and other resources.
📊 Keep an eye on the numbers. You’ll monitor usage data, engagement, and satisfaction metrics to spot trends and flag potential issues.
🧩 Problem-solver on call. While it’s the job of customer service representatives to solve some problems, you’ll be checking in with clients regularly to understand their evolving needs and their difficulties. Whether it’s anticipating a tech hiccup or addressing a strategic challenge, you’ll proactively jump in with solutions or loop in the right teams.
🚀 Fuel growth. You’ll look for moments to upsell, or cross-sell, based on your deep knowledge of customer needs and help your sales colleagues to close deals that align with what’s best for the customer.
🤝 Relationship builder. You’re the friendly face that clients trust. Your dedication and thorough knowledge of your company’s products helps to strengthen loyalty and build long-term partnerships.
📣 Voice of the customer. You’ll share insights and feedback internally, helping product and marketing teams make smarter decisions.
A Look at the Day-to-Day
“I manage a set of accounts and work with a team that includes a technical account manager and a support services manager. We collaborate to provide a holistic service to clients.”
Much of her role involves account planning, regular client check-ins, and helping clients adopt new features like Adobe’s AI capabilities. Internal work is also important—she updates client data in internal systems and runs monthly business reviews to track usage.
“About 75% of my time is spent in customer-facing meetings, calls, and emails. It’s a role that requires a high level of social interaction.”
Key Skills
“Project management and organizational skills are key. You need to handle multiple clients and their needs while staying organized. Social skills are also important, as you have to be comfortable dealing with executives and presenting in front of groups.”
She emphasizes that the job isn’t for everyone. “If you don’t like planning or logistics, this role might not be for you.”
I manage a set of accounts and work with a team that includes a technical account manager and a support services manager. We collaborate to provide a holistic service to clients. Much of my role involves account planning, regular client check-ins, and helping clients adopt new features like Adobe’s AI capabilities. Internal work is also important—I update client data in internal systems and run monthly business reviews to track usage.
Iris Tournier-Chen
How to Become a Customer Success Manager
Becoming a Customer Success Manager is like prepping for the ultimate people-centric business specialist career. You’ll need a solid mix of business education, customer-facing experience, and tech-savvy skills to succeed.
Let’s look at the qualifications, skills and experience that best prepare you for this role.
Qualifications and Education Requirements
While no particular degree is required, many CSMs have backgrounds in business, communication, hospitality, or tech. Specialized training in customer success, digital tools, and customer psychology can boost your profile.
First let's talk about education. Because this role requires a solid understanding of business fundamentals, most CSMs come into their role with an undergraduate degree in business, management, communication, and/or tech.
As a fast-track, a bachelor’s degree hospitality is a great choice. Hospitality education combines business with people-centric leadership, and while having a strong business foundation is important, keeping people happy is the superpower in this role. Additionally, a master’s degree or professional training in hospitality, is a great way to top-up a general business education to give you an extra edge.
Is a College Degree Necessary?
While it’s possible to enter the field of customer success without a college degree, it’s unlikely you’ll be hired as a CSM in today’s job market. Nowadays, formal education is usually a pre-requisite for management positions, unless you have many years of experience and are already working in a similar role.
A degree, especially from a business or hospitality school—will give you the best chance of getting into a CSM role and fast-track your career. It opens doors to higher-paying roles and leadership opportunities.
Gaining Relevant Experience
While no two career paths are ever alike, most future CSMs start out in customer-facing roles like sales, customer service, or hospitality. To build the right kind of work experience for this role, you should seek to gain experience in these areas:
- Customer Experience: Any client-facing role where you learn how to listen, solve problems, and stay cool under pressure will help you develop the people skills to become a great CSM. Retail, sales, and customer service positions all fit the bill.
- Business Administration: It’s also important to cultivate knowledge and working ease with the technology and processes that make a business run smoothly behind the scenes, such as CRM platforms, cloud computing, or SaaS tools.
- Managing People & Projects: Because CSM is management-level, you should come with some experience in managing teams or projects. This also includes account management. If you choose to study hospitality, then you can acquire this experience through your second-level internship.
After graduating from EHL, "I started in sales with Marks Evans and later worked in recruitment for the energy sector. I eventually transitioned to marketing in a small museum in Amsterdam, but it wasn’t client-facing enough for me, so I went back to event management, then joined UBM (now Informa), working with pharmaceutical exhibitions and sponsorships. I applied for a role at Adobe as a Customer Success Manager, even though I didn’t have direct experience in the SaaS field."
Iris Tournier-Chen, (EHL’12) Senior Customer Success Manager at Adobe
As we can see from Iris's example, the path to a CSM role doesn’t have to include extensive tech knowledge. With a few years of experience and excellent people skills, you can step into the world of customer success and enjoy helping clients achieve their goals while growing with your company.
Networking & Professional Development
Sometimes getting a great job is more about who you know than what you studied, and other times it’s about being in the right place, with the right skills. Here are a few different ways you can get closer to career in the customer success arena:
- Connect on LinkedIn with individuals working in this field and the hiring managers of companies that typically need customer success specialists.
- Join CS communities like Customer Success Collective and attend conferences or webinars on the subject to meet people.
- Reach out to your alumni network and share your interest on your profile to boost your visibility.
- Go through your academic, professional, and personal connections to look for a mentor who can help you get into the sector.
- Develop specialist skills with certifications like SuccessHACKER or by gaining practical experience with CRM platforms.
Essential Skills
You’ve probably heard it before—skills get you hired, but soft skills keep you rising. In today’s world, employers are often more impressed by how you handle people than how many platforms you’ve mastered. Customer Success is all about human connection—so if you're great with people and tech, you're golden. Here’s what you’ll need to shine:
Soft Skills
Empathy: Put yourself in the customer’s shoes—understanding their challenges is step one to helping them succeed.
Active Listening: It’s not just about hearing—it’s about catching what’s really being said and responding with care and clarity.
Conflict Resolution: Things won’t always go smoothly, and that’s okay. Knowing how to de-escalate and problem-solve is your superpower.
Clear Communication: Whether it’s a status update or a complex solution, you need to get your message across—kindly and clearly.
Time Management: You’ll be juggling clients, calls, follow-ups, and goals—being organized and efficient keeps the chaos in check.
Hard Skills
CRM Tools (Salesforce, HubSpot, Gainsight): These are your digital headquarters. Knowing how to navigate them makes your day-to-day smoother (and your data cleaner).
Data Analysis & Reporting: Tracking usage, spotting red flags, and proving impact—all starts with being comfy around numbers and dashboards.
Project Management: From onboarding to expansion plans, keeping timelines and teams aligned is key.
Basic Understanding of the Product/Service: You don’t need to be a developer, but you do need to know how your product works and why it matters.
Customer Lifecycle & Retention Strategies: Great CSMs know how to guide customers from first login to long-term loyalty, spotting churn risks before they happen.
Project management and organizational skills are key. You need to handle multiple clients and their needs while staying organized. Social skills are also important, as you have to be comfortable dealing with executives and presenting in front of groups.
Customer Success Manager Career Outlook
The demand for Customer Success Managers (CSMs) is projected to grow significantly as more industries adopt customer-centric business models.
In particular, sectors like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), fintech, hospitality tech, and health tech are leading the way.
According to LinkedIn’s 2024 Jobs on the Rise report, “Customer Success Manager” remains one of the fastest-growing job titles globally. In the SaaS sector, companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk rely on CSMs to drive product adoption and reduce churn.
In fintech, firms like Revolut and Wise use CSMs to build loyalty in competitive markets. Hospitality tech providers, such as Cloudbeds and Mews, employ CSMs to ensure smooth onboarding and continuous support for hoteliers, while health tech companies like Teladoc Health and Doctolib use CSMs to guide medical professionals through digital platforms.
This growing demand reflects a strategic shift: businesses increasingly focus on maximizing customer lifetime value (CLV) rather than solely acquiring new clients.
As a result, CSMs are becoming central to long-term business growth and customer loyalty strategies across B2B and B2C markets.
Career Progression
With experience, CSMs can move into roles like Senior CSM, Team Lead, Customer Success Director, or Head of Customer Experience. Some shift into Product Management, Operations or Sales.
The role is a springboard to many paths—and perfect for lifelong learners and relationship builders.
Customer Success Manager Salary
Now, let’s talk about the money. As you would expect for a role that requires specialist knowledge and excellent customer-facing skills, CSMs make a good living. Obviously, your salary will depend on your background, location, and level within the company.
Starting out, it’s not uncommon for a CSM to make around $55,000 per year, but with time and advanced responsibilities, they gradually make in excess of $110,000 per year.
Likewise, working in a big city such as New York or San Francisco often comes with a higher salary to offset the cost of living.webp?width=1920&height=1080&name=Graphs%20templates%20MTG%20(1).webp)
Tips for Career Changers
Thinking about making a career switch to customer success roles? Here’s what you can do to bridge the gap between your current educational profile and professional strengths and what hiring managers seek for these roles.
Highlight Soft Skills
If you’re coming from sales, teaching, hospitality, or any client-facing role, you’re already halfway there. CSMs need strong communication skills, emotional intelligence, and the ability to build trust—things you’ve probably been doing for years.
On your motivational letters and CV, try to highlight your empathy, your knack for explaining things clearly, and your experience handling tricky customer situations with grace.
Begin to Develop the Hard Skills
Start by brushing up on tools commonly used in customer success like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Gainsight. You might also want to get comfortable with data—CSMs often track metrics like churn rate, NPS, and product usage.
Make sure your Excel skills are top notch and that you are familiar with the commonly used project management and teamwork platforms
Seek Certification
Short courses or certifications can help fill any gaps and show employers your serious about a career change. Many online learning platforms offer targeted programs for building a foundation in the aforementioned areas.
These are perfect for career shifters looking to enter tech-adjacent roles without needing a full degree.
Utilize Your Network
Don’t underestimate the power of your existing network. Reach out to people in roles you admire and ask them how they made the jump. A little curiosity and confidence can go a long way.
Start Your Journey to Becoming a Customer Success Manager
If you enjoy helping people, building relationships, and seeing the direct impact of your work, Customer Success could be the perfect path. With clear growth potential and opportunities across industries and borders, now’s the time to explore this rewarding career.
