Customer Success Account Manager

About the job

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us to achieve our mission.

Customer Success: Microsoft aspires to help our customers achieve their own digital transformation, leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud solutions and support offerings. To this end, Microsoft invests in a dedicated Customer Success team that will help Microsoft customers successfully realize their business outcomes.

We are always learning. Insatiably curious. We lean into uncertainty, take risks, and learn quickly from our mistakes. We build on each other’s ideas because we are better together. We stand in awe of what humans dare to achieve and are motivated every day to empower others to do more and achieve more through our technology and innovation. Together we make a difference.

Responsibilities

As a Customer Success Account Manager (CSAM), you are the primary customer facing role responsible for customer success through delivery management of cross-functional programs and strong customer and internal stakeholder relationships. The prevailing business priority is the customers’ successful adoption and productive use of Microsoft cloud technologies. You are front and center with our customers in support of their digital journey and empowering them to achieve more and accelerating customer value.

The CSAM role is a leader on the account team who partners with the ATU to programmatically align the consumption plan to the account plan and leads the delivery execution and support team. The CSAM orchestrates prioritized programs, projects, and milestones for customer business value realization and consumption.

Key Accountabilities Include

Partner with your customer and Account Team

• Bring Customer and industry insights to the Account Planning rhythm to lead prioritized programs that drive outcomes across all solution areas.

Accountable for the Consumption plan

• In partnership with the account team, accountable for the development and execution of the internal and customer-facing aspects cross-cloud consumption plan, identifying and activating technical resources to deliver customer outcomes. Ensures prioritized Success Engagements progress from Validate through Commit with a Program Delivery plan and up-to-date milestones.

Engages Customer Sponsors

• Establishes and nurtures strong sponsorship and manages the relationships with the customer to drive the execution of the support coverage model, consumption roadmap & delivery execution oversight. and manage the communication & escalation strategies with customer stakeholders.

Leverages technology knowledge

• Has the technical depth and confidence to identify and propose outcomes related to the deployment and health of customer solutions and workloads, leveraging deeper technical resources as needed

Accountable for Delivery Orchestration & Support Outcomes that support Solution and Operational Health outcomes

• Provides leadership and orchestration across the Success & Support (CSU) team, Microsoft technical specialists, customer technical teams, Microsoft and partner project teams, balances prioritization between implementing new capabilities and ensuring customer operational health, while fulfilling Support contract obligations
• Define outcomes to improve the health, performance, and business capabilities of the prioritized workloads to drive customer value realization.
• Track, escalate, and plan for the remediation of technical blockers and provide engineering feedback to further our product and solutions as appropriate.

Qualifications

We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate Customer Success Account Manager to drive program management for strategic customers that have a significant number of key cross-cloud workload engagements running concurrently. As the CSAM you will drive consumption planning & execution, as well as the acceleration of cloud adoption from Pilot/MVP to production for customer cloud engagements. This will be done by providing cross-engagement oversight, resource orchestration, and blocker escalation, all while operating in close collaboration with key account team unit members and business partners who are supporting customer success.

Experience: 5+ years of success in complex technical engagement management and/or program management required. Prior work experience in a Program Manager or Engagement Manager position focused on Cloud and software/services solution preferred.

Leadership: This role requires strong communication skills, as well as displaying executive presence and confidence in varying levels of customer situations. The CSAM must show leadership in teams comprised of Microsoft, Partner and Customer resources who may be engaged in the delivery of complex solutions for overall customer success.

Relationship Building: Proven track record of building relationships with senior customer executives in large or highly strategic accounts. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solutions/engagements required.

Program Management: Excellent skills in planning for a portfolio of engagements, cross-group collaboration, resource orchestration, communications, analytical capabilities, and attention to detail required. The CSAM will be accountable for the development and execution of a cross-cloud consumption plan, and operational health of the customer solutions deployed today and in the future.

Collaboration and Communication: Proven track record of driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts, and ensuring follow-through with verbal and written communication. Strong presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences and various levels of management (Senior Executives, IT management, Database administrators Data Scientist, and BDMs).

Technical Acumen

• Ability to understand business requirements and customer problems and solve them through cloud technologies
• Enterprise scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management
• Experience with and understanding of large scale application portfolios in enterprise wide environments (including migration of on premises workloads to the cloud)

Subject matter expertise in one or more of the following:

• Software design, development and deployment for one or more of the following platforms: Web application server technologies, Clo ud applications, mobile (Android, iOS), Linux, Windows
• DevOps practices, including continuous planning/Agile, CI/CD, quality and security and one of the DevOps tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure DevOps, GitHub)
• One or more of the following programming languages: C++, C#, Java, Node.js, JSON, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails
• Experience with scalable architectures using Azure App Service, API management, serverless technologies, container orchestrat ion (e.g. Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry etc.), API management, Microservice frameworks etc
• Competitive landscape and knowledge of cloud development platforms

Education

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or related field preferred.
• Certification(s) in the following preferred:
  • Project Management: ACP, PMI, or equivalent Project Management certification
  • Prosci or equivalent Change Management certification
  • Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Foundation certification
  • Technologies: Cloud, mobile, web application development, cloud-native application architecture
  • Microsoft certification in relevant technologies (e.g.: Azure, M365)