The Complete Guide to Writing a Customer Success Manager Resume

Diane Caimares

Resume writer, Career Coach, and Business Owner

---

The job market for customer relations management is expanding and becoming more competitive. Many people believe that writing a customer success manager resume is straightforward. They think it only takes a few minutes to come up with one without any help from other people or programs. The truth is that writing a resume for customer relations jobs, such as a customer success specialist, can be very challenging. So it is vital to craft a document that that helps you compete.

The first thing to think about is the purpose of creating a resume. Overall, the purpose of this resume is to secure job interviews with potential employers. In short, a Customer Success Manager resume is a document that summarizes your work experience, skills, qualifications, and education. It goes on to represent who you are as a professional in a well-written and concise format. 

What are the Job Requirements for Customer Success Manager Resumes?

A Client Success Manager resume (CSM) position can be found in several industries. These industries range from IT to healthcare. Therefore, the requirements for each sector may vary.

Overall, the CSMs are often considered the heart and soul of a company. Customer success managers ensure that customers remain happy and satisfied with the product. In addition, they provide customers with instructions on using the product effectively while also keeping them informed about new updates and features. Even in this position, collaboration becomes key as they work closely with sales and account managers to close deals and ensure customer satisfaction. 

To summarize, a Customer Success Manager can work in tandem with Customer support to ensure customers are satisfied with the products they have purchased.

Overview of Current Job

According to Comparably, the average salary earned nationally is $70,010 per year. However, the compensation varies depending on the state, experience, and skills offered to the employer. The pay ranges between $30,000 and $200,000 per year. Therefore, it is crucial to research the salaries. 

To think more in depth about it, Client Success Manager and Customer Service Manager are umbrella terms for a broader range of job titles and positions. So it is important to identify the correct job title, as there are different titles for Client Success Manager resumes being used in the industry. Some of those titles are the following: 

Essential Qualifications

When showcasing your qualifications and professional experience as a customer success specialist, make sure the Customer Success Manager resume is unique and concise. You should demonstrate that you are the right candidate and are willing to go the extra mile for the client. Be sure your language is triggering enough to catch the attention of the employer or recruiter. 

To do that, you can use the following wording: 

• Managed client on-boarding process
• Generated marketing strategies to increase sales
• Collaborated with colleagues
• Increase sales by #%
• Maintained #% of customer retention 

It is essential to look at what the potential employer is looking for in their candidate. Understanding who they are as a company and what they want or need from an individual will increase your chances of getting an interview.

Relevant Experience

Customer success specialists are in high demand right now. But, unfortunately, there is a massive gap between the skills these CSM resumes need to demonstrate and the skills that employers want to see on a Customer Success Manager skills resume.

So, what do you need to showcase on your Customer Success Manager resume? First, it’s essential to put your customer success skills resume on display, and make sure that employers understand what you can do for them and their business. For example, the ability to successfully manage a team is a critical skill that CSMs need to have. They also need to generate reports and insights on product usage, ROI, and many more for management purposes. A CSM will also identify any problems or issues before they escalate and create a plan to deal with them before they worsen. A CSM must have excellent communication skills, analytical skills, interpersonal skills, negotiation skills, and leadership qualities.

As you can see, a Customer Success Manager is the person who interacts with the customers to ensure they are satisfied. They are often involved with every aspect of the customer’s experience, including interacting with them through all channels, gathering feedback, and maintaining relationships.

Therefore, other important skills that should be displayed are: 

• Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite, specifically Excel and PowerPoint 
• Knowledge of customer service practices
• Technical aspects like reporting and analytics

Pro Tip: Do your research and look at what the company is looking for in a candidate. Alter your Customer Success resume template to demonstrate that you have those specific skills that the company is looking for in a candidate. 

Building Your Customer Success Manager Resume

The essential thing in your customer success manager resume is the “Selling Me” section. A CSM resume highlights the candidate’s skills and experiences with managing the relationship between their organization or company and its customers. In addition, the Customer Success Manager resume should be well-written to highlight necessary qualifications that will make the candidate stand out from other applicants.

While it might seem difficult to write an introduction that covers all the topics and keywords while still being relevant and informative, some things can help you get started. First, start by outlining each section’s topic and keywords to understand better what you want to say about them. 

How to Build a Rock-Solid Professional Summary in Your Customer Success Manager Resume

Resume summaries on Client Success Manager resumes, Customer Success Specialists resumes, or Customer Success Manager resumes should not be objective and arbitrary. Instead, they should summarize all your accomplishments, number of experiences, awards, and anything that will make you stand out. The Customer Success Manager resume summary should be a 2 to 5 sentence summarizing everything while enticing them to continue reading. 

Example phrases to use on your Customer Success Manager resumes: 

“I have a proven track record of….” 

 “Recognized by…”

“I am an ambitious and goal-oriented professional with experience in achieving # of goals, metric-driven….” 

“Customer Success executive with # of years….”

Promote CSM Experience in the Experience Section of Your Customer Success Manager Resume 

The experience section is the first section on the Customer Success resume. This is an opportunity to show what you have done in your professional life and how it has impacted others.

The customer success manager resume will be different from other professionals who have had a very linear career path. In this case, each point on your Customer Success resume would represent a different company, position, and responsibility. It’s important to include this information so that potential employers can see how you have succeeded at many different types of roles and companies.

Customer Success Manager resume examples aim to highlight your skills and accomplishments. You want to show how you have helped customers, created solutions for them, and participated in the growth of the company.

If you are looking for a customer success manager job, it is important that you put your best foot forward! So, follow these tips on how to promote your CSM experience on your Customer Success Manager resume:

• Know what competencies are being sought by the company.
• Demonstrate that you have met these competencies with examples from past experiences.
• Show what value you bring to the company.

Examples of Your Accomplishments within Summary and Experience

Customer success managers are vital to the success of any company and it’s important that their CSM resumes reflect that. The customer success manager is a person who is accountable for the quality of services and customer experience. They also work to ensure that customers are satisfied with the product they have purchased.

Successful customer service representatives need to be able to identify and anticipate needs of both customers and company, provide solutions in a timely manner, be able to communicate effectively, build relationships with customers, and understand their business’ philosophy.

So when writing the experience section of your resume, you shouldn’t just think about what your role was. You should also include concrete and measurable achievements from each position. Here are some examples:

• Helped company grow from $2M to $4M in revenue within 12 months through customer engagement, sales, and account management.
• Led marketing initiatives for clients such as Google, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft.
• Launched a marketing campaign for a company that boosted conversion rates by 400%. 
• Increased conversion rates by 16% in the span of six months for one client alone.
• Work has been featured in Forbes and Wired magazine.

The Skills and Abilities of a Great CSM

When creating your Customer Success Specialist resume, make sure to place strong keywords that showcase your skills, experience, and education. As mentioned, many times keywords will make your Customer Success resume stand out, and it will be easier for potential employers to search for you faster. 

Common Keywords from CSM Job Descriptions: 

Soft Skills for Customer Success Manager resumes: 

• Flexibility 
• Communication 
• Sales experience 

Hard Skills for Customer Success Manager resumes: 

• Relationship Management 
• Grit (Tenacity) 
• Problem-solving 
• Data Integration 

Education

The education section is an important section on a customer success manager resume because it showcases your academic achievements and what you have learned. You can choose to include the full list of courses or just the highlights from each of the courses taken as part of your degree program.

This section should be at the bottom of your customer success manager resume. However, it is vital that you don’t forget include it. Your education section in your CSM resume can be an area where you can really show off. The education section should include the name of your school, major, grade point average (GPA) if you’re a recent graduate (and it is something worth showing off), graduation date, degree level, and awards.

The Customer Success Manager resume education section can look like this:

Institute Name
College degree
Location (City, State)
Graduation date or anticipated Date

Professional Achievements

Sell, sell, and sell yourself! Your Customer Success resume is your tool to market yourself to potential employers or recruiters. For your customer success manager resume to successfully get chosen for an interview, your professional achievements should contain metrics that highlight your achievements within those previous job positions. 

It is important to distinguish this from the metrics you should include in your work experience section. On one hand, your work experience section will list achievements specifically for the role in which you are writing about. Whereas a professional achievements section gives you the opportunity to talk about accomplishments that aren’t particular to a single role. As you write this section, it is also important to only include professional achievements that are relevant.

For a professional achievements section, you can include achievements such as:

• Publications
• Certifications
• Volunteer experience
• Special projects
• Inventions/theories/innovations that you created to help manage customers

What’s the Difference Between A Good Customer Success Manager Resume and A Great One? 

The Customer Success Specialist resume is the backbone of any good CSM. It’s what everyone will want to see before you are even given a chance to show off your customer success skills resume.

The first piece of advice for writing a great Customer Success Manager resume is to tailor your resume specifically to your audience and position requirements. Keep in mind what qualities the hiring manager is looking for in their ideal candidate; then list those qualities on your resume.

As you list those qualities, it is important to remember that only highlighting those qualities will not be enough to take your resume from good to great. There are additional elements that must be present to knock the socks off of the hiring manager. The following are three additional elements that make a great Customer Success Specialist resume:

• Personal branding – Make sure to add your own little touch to your resume. Make it neat, choose a nice font, and be sure the colors are presentable. You may even choose to add links to your digital portfolio, video resume, or social media accounts.
• Bridge the gap between expectations and reality – If there are ANY expectations in the job description that you meet, you should be sure to put it in your resume. Additionally, it will be more harmful than beneficial to put points from the job description in your resume if you do not possess those skills.
• Showcase your competitive edge – It is common knowledge now that you should include measurable achievements in your resume. However, it doesn’t hurt to take it one step further. In a very short sentence, you can tell how your achievement impacted the company in a major way.

Employer-Specific Tips

It is advisable to focus on your customer service skills and take a step back when it comes to technical skills. Make sure that the customer success manager resume reflects your personality and creativity in order for you to stand out from the crowd.

A Customer Success resume is more about showcasing your soft skills rather than emphasizing your hard skills. This means highlighting your communication, empathy, creativity, teamwork, leadership qualities etc., rather than mentioning the technical aspects of what you do in a customer service department. By doing this, you will be able to shed light on how those soft skills help increase the quality of your service, find solutions, retain customers, and so forth.

Employers would be looking for someone who can not only provide solutions but also work in teams and be able to empathize with their customers’ needs.

Common Mistakes 

A well-written Customer Success Specialist resume is a crucial document for any job seeker who wants to get the attention of the employer and make sure that he or she gets noticed. While there are guides like this one giving you good advice to write a flawless resume, there are also some things that guides don’t cover. That is why I am going to include a couple of common mistakes that you should avoid while writing a Customer Success resume.

Misunderstanding the job description: How often do you look at a job description and decide it is too long, so you just skim it? That’s a no no. It is important to thoroughly read the position’s description and highlight the keywords in order to understand what you are being asked for. The more relevant experience you have with each keyword, the better.

Too much personal information: As a customer service manager, it is important that you show professionalism and maintain focus on your work. This means that including too much personal information should be avoided.

Interview Questions

By following this guide, and crafting a great customer service manager resume, you can expect the next steps to be an interview. While interview preparation requires you to practice some common behavioral interview questions, there are also questions that can help you prepare specifically for a CSM role. So, once your resume has proven successful, here are some CSM-specific interview questions to practice.

• What do you consider a vital key to obtaining customer retention? 
• Please provide us with a one-minute speech informing us about a product our company sells. 
• You demonstrated a presentation to a client and realized that one of your team members said the wrong information. How would you handle that with your team members and client?
• How would you increase sales within our company?
• Would you please describe a time where you had a difficult team member? How did you handle the situation?  

Conclusion

The Customer Success resume is your first step to landing the job you want. Your potential employer will evaluate this document, so it must reflect you in the best light possible. Therefore, your customer success manager resume should detail your work experience and show how you can apply these skills to this particular company or position.

In the end, your resume should reflect those parts of your life that you want others to know about in a short time. So, make sure the Customer Success Manager resume is compelling and succinct enough! Remember that you are selling and marketing yourself because you’re not the only one who is after the position. So, make the employer see that you are worth their time and effort. Research, research, and research; it is crucial to know what you are worth, and it is vital to comprehend what the industry is looking for in a customer success specialist. 

Additional Resources – Samples and Examples

• Job Hero: Customer Success Manager Resume Examples 
• QwikResume: Customer Success Manager Resume Samples