Customer Success Lead

With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft's end-to-end customer experience. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers come to us not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, but also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience.

The Customer Success Leader is the most senior Customer Success (CS) resource in each geography or segment, reporting to the Country leader. The Customer Success Leader is responsible for the overall business performance of the Customer Success organization. This role is chartered with optimizing the organization's capabilities aligned with CS business goals and championing consumption, exceptional proactive support delivery, and operational excellence within their organization. This role is further chartered with ensuring that the necessary capabilities exist within the organization while creating and sustaining a culture of customer centricity, technical intensity, innovation, and a growth mindset anchored in Microsoft values.

We are hiring a senior leader to serve as Customer Success Leader to steer the Customer Success team, build presence in the market and inspire large scale customer impact through customer engagement and thought leadership. The Customer Success Leader will be a passionate, forward-thinking, hands-on leader with exceptional skills in developing and leading a highly technical team focused on Microsoft Cloud Solutions and customer support experience. This person will be very active in day-to-day coaching of his/her team, leading by example, ensuring that the organization's capabilities are aligned with Customer Success priorities and business goals, championing the success adoption of Microsoft cloud solutions, and driving an exceptional customer support experience through proactive service delivery and compliant operational excellence within their organization.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

People Management

• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.
• Model - Live our culture; Embody our values; Practice our leadership principles.
• Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn.
• Care - Attract and retain great people; Know each individual's capabilities and aspirations; Invest in the growth of others.

Technical Leadership

• Leverages credibility and expertise to act as executive-level technical sponsor and leader for customers and partner ecosystem to continuously evolve and grow through the digital transformation journey (e.g., increase usage/consumption to drive customer expansion, upsell and renewal recapture rates). Provides area/global thought leadership for technical integration and innovation with the area leadership team. Creates a culture of technical community engagement with customers and partners to influence actions and results at senior and executive levels of their organizations. Drives technical executive sponsorship with the customer and partner and influences strategy for regional scale. Leads critical engagements with customer and partner senior leadership, providing executive support for the Customer Success Unit (CSU) team to align operational plans with the organization's strategies to drive customer and partner obsession.
• Builds and maintains a network with senior technical decision makers (e.g., Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Architect, technical fellows) to provide technical and operational guidance on technology trends and accelerate continuous cloud adoption at scale. Leverages deep technical knowledge, technical resources (e.g., Cloud Solution Architects), and peer connections to establish and elevate trusted and influential relationships with customer decision makers (e.g., Chief Executive-level) for large and/or high-impact (e.g., highest consuming) customers to drive customer adoption.
• Advocates to drive customer technical requirements with corporate product and engineering teams. Creates an internal feedback loop to drive broad, systemic continuous improvement for customers across Microsoft (e.g., security, product support). Leverages and creates customer and employee forums for open feedback and collaboration across teams. Invests in building and maintaining a strong network with corporate engineers to quickly meet customer and partner needs.
• Serves as an expert/spokesperson, as appropriate around key technical, operational and customer success topics (e.g., product/service lifecycle, customer perspective) to influence and drive recognition for Microsoft solutions and brands by speaking at events, having an active presence on social media platforms, and encouraging organizational participation. Leverages subject matter expertise to be an influential voice in the area/globally, clarifying technical and operational questions and technology position. Supports Customer Success Unit (CSU) community-building internally and externally by providing community thought leadership and orchestrating with professional network to promote learning.

Business Leadership

• Cultivates an active, global network of partners through orchestration with Global Partner Solutions (GPS) in the area/globally to drive consumption, usage, and deliver customer value. Builds on their social and professional network and establishes a collaborative, customer-focused relationship with partners to ensure customers are supported by partners. Shares a vision to guide orchestration across Solution Areas and stakeholders (e.g., Specialist Team Unit [STU], Customer Success Unit [CSU], Account Team Unit [ATU], Global Partner Solutions [GPS] within the subsidiary/area/region) to drive usage and consumption outcomes. Engages partners in consumption reviews to review progress and pipeline. Takes accountability for owning customer engagement in order to drive the growth of cloud services.
• Leverages integrated Services, consumption and support businesses to scale and grow commercial deployments across the area/globally (as appropriate to scope). Facilitates the model and leads comprehensive integration of Services resources to deliver on comprehensive consumption execution model. Facilitates value realization through the accountability of the end-to-end Customer Success business, including consumption, unified support, and resource management. Ensures business financial performance realization across the area/globally (as appropriate to scope) through an emphasis on operational excellence and rigor (e.g., pipeline management, execution, ownership of customer journey). Manages levers across the area/globally (as appropriate to scope) to drive financial performance across the business (e.g., consumption and usage, unified consumed revenue, delivery mix). Shapes execution strategy across the area/globally (as appropriate to scope) within standards and constraints to realize vision and maximize consumption and usage growth.
• Provides leadership to define the execution plan to connect sales planning and execution through delivery planning and execution, aligned with customer and business priorities to achieve consumption and usage targets. Provides strategic leadership on value-based delivery to grow consumption and usage for the area/globally by emphasizing the importance of adoption economics and customer value. Ensures establishment and delivery of Customer Success and major incident response plans by driving collaboration across the area/globally (e.g., Services, partners, Customer Success Unit team, Account Team Unit, Solution Team Unit, Engineering), engaging with customers to elicit feedback and agreement (e.g., sign off), and ensuring integration with the broader account plan process. Participates in area and global business rhythms to represent the business, including resolution of issues and requests. Leads team through sales customer planning and delivery execution at the area level/globally (as appropriate). Drives pipeline excellence/management to ensure customer priorities and revenue/financial targets are met at the area level/globally (as appropriate).

Business Execution

• Engages with Microsoft and partner resources to ensure awareness and understanding of Customer Success organization and roles within their area/globally. Leads internal cadences to ensure coverage of Customer Success resources for customers. Grows advocacy and loyalty for Customer Success Management (CSM) and Cloud Solution Architecture (CSA) practices across the area/globally, and secures the positioning of the roles toward internal and external stakeholders. Ensures the team is orchestrating Microsoft teams to deliver on customer consumption plans.
• Drives consumption and usage rigor and discipline by developing and leading inclusive and regular rhythm of business (ROB) processes for a large subsidiary. Delivers on business commitments, collects performance data, reports performance to Global Lead and Strategy Team, and informs future plans and decisions (e.g., forecasting, anticipated barriers). Leads a coaching rhythm in alignment to Microsoft's coaching framework and worldwide rhythm framework practices, integrated both locally and with Corporate.
• Creates culture to drive operational and pipeline excellence, with particular focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) covering operating model metrics (e.g., growth, velocity, efficiency, resource allocation) to ensure consistent execution against strategy. Escalates to ensure removal of blockers related to the customer business and/or internal processes to deliver technical and operational excellence in Customer Success teams and accelerate customer adoption. Leads area-level/global-level rhythm of business (ROB) and instills a sense of urgency for strategic agility through other leaders. Identifies widespread or global patterns in blockers and develops strategies to resolve and prevent them in the future. Assesses and prioritizes high-impact technical blockers and coaches team to enable resolution. Leverages systems for identifying leading and lagging indicators of success across customer success pipeline at the area/regional level (as appropriate). Drives area/regional accountability (as appropriate) to identify gaps in execution leading to optimizing customer success delivery for value realization.
• Drives customer engagement by ensuring implementation and growth of a predictable and scalable customer engagement model across all enterprise accounts (e.g., Strategic, Major) for the area/globally, leveraging global delivery and Customer Success Unit (CSU) resources, partners, and Microsoft Services. Drives a large team of leaders to ensure customers achieve desired business outcomes and optimization of their investment. Ensures the organization expands learning on new adoption frameworks and new platform capabilities that cross both technical and business value conversations. Ensures the team identifies the right partners to deliver and execute on customer vision.

People Leadership

• Facilitates integrated resource execution to accelerate growth and consumption and usage. Ensures alignment and commitment across Microsoft resources pools (e.g., Engineering, Global Black Belts, End Customer Investment Funds, Marketing and Operations) for the area/globally to ensure seamless hand-offs between internal customer-facing organizations. Leverages internal network to work across groups, influence stakeholders, resolve escalated issues (e.g., Executive Vice President, Corporate Vice President-level), manage risk, and create consistency of execution and a positive experience for the customer. Maximizes the yield and return on interest (ROI) of Customer Success Unit (CSU) resources at the area level/globally (as appropriate) by aligning resources to the highest impact opportunities and engagements and leading delivery excellence initiatives to optimize business impact.
• Inspires and fosters a culture of customer obsession, technical intensity, inclusivity of thought, operational excellence, and cross-team collaboration to shape the end-to-end customer experience. Encourages and empowers teams to share learnings, calibrate on challenges and trends, and leverage pre-existing resources to promote community sharing across the subsidiary. Coaches team to create and sustain value and trust with customers by leading them towards value realization based on subject matter expertise, respectfully challenging their decisions and/or areas for improvement, explaining cost impacts, project context, operational implications, business impact, etc., and encouraging them to consider alternative approaches as appropriate. Drives accountability of the customer success team to deliver on consumption plan(s) targets.
• Creates a learning culture across the Enterprise Operating Unit (EOU) in an area/globally that feeds technical and operational leadership and business value capabilities (e.g., technical readiness agenda), enables collaboration and continuous learning, and promotes intellectual curiosity, participation and effective use of resources.
• Proactively fosters collaboration within Microsoft by helping Customer Success Account Manager (CSAM), Customer Success Manager (CSM) and Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) resources connect to relevant Microsoft stakeholders and build relationships across the organization and worldwide CSU community, when appropriate. Leads by example by bringing in other functions (e.g., Engineering, Global Black Belt) to act on Customer Success qualified leads or expansion opportunities. Drives and oversees change and enables team to succeed through rapid change by communicating the strategy behind the changes, leading the team through change, and championing the adoption to accelerate outcomes.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Business Management, Engineering, or related field AND strong years professional experience including technology leadership, consulting/professional services, product strategy, business leadership, sales, or directly within Customer Success
  • OR Master's Degree in Business Management, Engineering, or related field AND 12+ years professional experience including technology leadership, consulting/professional services, product strategy, business leadership, sales, or directly within Customer Success
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 8+ years engineering and/or technology experience (e.g., technology field, Services, Consultant, Specialist Team Unit, Technical Sales, system integrators, developer, project manager, sales).
• 5+ years people management/leadership experience.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.

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