Customer Success Lead – Southeast Europe Subsidiary

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 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 organizations 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.

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 sponsor and leader for highest consuming customers and partner ecosystem to continuously evolve and grow through digital transformation journey. Provides global thought leadership for technical integration and innovation with the area leadership team. Creates culture of community engagement with customers to influence actions and results at senior and executive levels of the organization. Drives executive sponsorship through the partner ecosystem and influences strategy for regional scale.
• Builds and maintains a network with senior technical decision makers (e.g., Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Architect, technical fellows) to provide guidance on technology trends and cloud adoption. 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. Coaches team to be proactive, agile, and responsible to the voice of the customer. Creates an internal feedback loop to drive broad, global continuous improvement. Creates customer and employee forums for open feedback and collaboration across teams.
• Serves as an industry expert/spokesperson, as appropriate (e.g., industry-specific Operating Units) around key technical and customer success topics to drive recognition for Microsoft solutions and brands by speaking at events, blogging, and encouraging organizational participation. Supports Customer Success Unit (CSU) community-building internally and externally by providing community thought leadership and orchestrating with professional network to promote learning.

Business Execution

• Engages with Microsoft and partner resources to ensure awareness and understanding of Customer Success organization and roles globally. Leads internal cadences to ensure coverage of Customer Success Manager (CSM) and Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) resources for customers. Grows account references, advocacy, and loyalty for CSM and CSA practices across the subregion/area/globally. Secures the positioning of the roles toward internal and external stakeholders.
• Drives consumption rigor and discipline in area by developing and leading inclusive and regular rhythm of business (ROB) processes for a large subsidiary to collect performance data, report performance to Global Lead and Strategy Team, and inform future plans and decisions (e.g., forecasting, anticipated barriers). Leads a coaching rhythm in alignment with Customer Success Manager (CSM) coaching framework, integrated both locally and with Corporate. Coaches leaders in project management to drive business execution.
• Creates culture to drive operational excellence to allow for anticipating blockers by identifying and prioritizing CSU resources for key projects and empowering others to raise blockers and competitive insights. Escalates to ensure removal of blockers related to the customer business and/or internal processes to deliver technical excellence in Customer Success teams and accelerate customer adoption. Leads area-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.
• Drives customer engagement by ensuring implementation of a predictable and scalable customer engagement model across all enterprise accounts (e.g., Strategic, Major) for the Area, leveraging Customer Success Unit (CSU) resources, partners, and Microsoft Services. Drives large team of leaders to ensure high-impact customers achieve desired business outcomes and optimization of their investment. Leverages industry expertise and the power of One Microsoft to align and drive customer intent with appropriate resource models to accelerate consumption and realize customer value. Ensures the organization expands learning on new adoption frameworks and new platform capabilities that cross both technical and business value conversations. Provides recommendations for potential areas of expansion at the area/global level.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

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

o 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

o 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. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

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