Customer Success Director Jobs in Illinois

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Role Description

The Customer Success Manager (CSM) Director is a strategic value partner for Slack’s most complex and high-impact customers who purchase the Signature Success Plan. In this high-visibility role, you will drive a holistic success strategy that aligns Slack’s platform capabilities with the customer’s long-term business objectives and ensure they achieve a significant return on their investment with our platform. This role functions as an extension of the customer’s workforce and a trusted advisor, providing guidance and advice to customer organizations. The CSM Director is responsible for identifying and addressing both technical and business concerns, aligning them strategically with customer priorities, projects, and problems.

The CSM Director advises and guides a wide variety of customers, ensuring they launch Slack successfully, adopt it widely, and continuously gain business value from our products and services. We serve as the trusted point of contact for Slack’s strategic key customers across the customer lifecycle. Part coach, project manager, consultant, and product specialist, our Slack CSMs work closely with customers to discover their business needs and challenges and then mentor them on the best ways to use Slack to tackle them.

We are looking for candidates who have experience supporting customers in one or more of the following industries:

• Technology Media Telecommunication (TMT) – Works with technology companies, telecommunications providers, media organizations, and high-tech firms to accelerate innovation, improve customer success outcomes, and drive platform adoption at scale (Direct experience with Media Cloud strongly preferred).
• Consumer Business Services (CBS) – Supports companies in professional services, hospitality, travel, transportation, and business services sectors, helping them optimize customer engagement and operational efficiency across complex service delivery models.

Your Impact

Customer Accountability and Value Alignment

• Executive management & ROI driven engagement: serve as the single point of customer accountability responsible for the delivery of all Slack Signature deliverables, the overall customer experience, and renewal and expansion.
• Coordinate all deliverables the customer is entitled to, overseeing the experience throughout the Signature lifecycle.
• Apply the correct processes to address customer needs and ensure value is delivered through the Signature offer.
• Successfully align with and manage both Business and Technical Stakeholders, focusing on aligning Business Value and Technical Goals to the Signature offer.
• Prioritize the most urgent work activities, organize tasks to avoid missing key steps, and create basic plans to focus time, taking responsibility for assigned tasks.
• Use internal resources to increase effectiveness and rely on managers or mentors for guidance on priority problems.
• Conduct enablement sessions on opportunity and case management, forecasting, pipeline hygiene, knowledge creation, and omni-channel routing.
• Share best practices for sales and service process optimization, data quality, and customer experience.
• Conduct maturity assessments and build Slack adoption roadmaps.

Strategic Advisory and Stakeholder Management

• Drive adoption of Slack features with reps, agents, managers, supervisors, and ops teams.
• Track usage metrics (active users, messages, channel engagement, app usage) and accelerate adoption, maturity, and growth across Slack’s largest customers while ensuring each customer realizes maximum business value.
• Assess business requirements and advise on best practices for governance, channel structure, and workspace organization.
• Develop and maintain strong relationships at key stakeholder levels, including cultivating executive-level relationships within customer IT and business leadership.
• Act as a trusted advisor by gaining trust through mutual goals, understanding the customer’s business model, and applying proven solutions to their problems.
• Solidify partnership commitments and drive innovation aligned with customers' business challenges.
• Increase customer engagement with products and services and identify major political barriers to customer success.
• Conduct quarterly reviews of feature usage to drive adoption of tools like Journey Builder or Commerce Promotions, ensuring platform stability and performance.
• Identify underutilization of contracted entitlements (e.g., messaging volume or GMV tiers) and align platform features with customer priorities to increase throughput.

Technical Health, Adoption, and Risk Management

• AI Literacy: Proficiency in using AI agents to automate routine tasks such as meeting summaries, QBR data collection, and initial health monitoring.
• Prompt Engineering Basics: Ability to use natural-language commands to guide AI agents in retrieving accurate customer data and generating first drafts of success plans.
• AI Engagement Monitoring: Using AI-driven sentiment and intent analysis to flag early customer concerns for human intervention.
• Collaborative Learning: Actively seeking out "Agentblazer" training and certifications to stay current on autonomous agent capabilities.
• Learning & Development: Apply product knowledge and expertise to address technical concerns, use this knowledge to ask effective diagnosis questions, and align platform features with customer priorities and roadmaps.
• Proactively monitor and conduct quarterly reviews, identify trends, and provide tailored release recommendations to ensure stability, performance, and feature enhancement.
• Serve as the primary interface for major incidents (e.g., checkout failures or email deliverability drops) to protect peak revenue.
• Forge strong multidisciplinary relationships with Sales, Engineering, and Product Management to lead and coordinate customer relationships for success and revenue opportunities.
• Form a clear plan for client engagements, communicate clearly and proactively with collaborators, and keep the customer goal central to decision-making.
• Escalate complex automation, data model, routing, or integration questions to technical resources.

Minimum Requirements

• Experienced business professional, preferably with 9+ years of relevant industry expertise in Customer Success, SaaS platform use, or related fields, with expert industry-relevant expertise.
• Strong consulting skills and proven results working as a trusted advisor to drive business value, facilitate discussions, handle objections, and influence C-level conversations.
• Excellent communication skills to articulate technical issues to diverse audiences and the ability to translate technical concepts into business terms.
• Executive-level interpersonal skills, ability to drive effective conversations at the C-Level, and presentation skills with a consistent track record of influence at an executive level.
• Ability to facilitate difficult discussions and be adept at handling objections.

Cloud/Platform Requirements - INCLUDED with the above:

• 6-8 years of direct experience working on Slack; familiarity with Slack best practices and an understanding of how Slack enables modern workplace collaboration.
• Slack Certified Admin Certification

Additional Salesforce product certifications are a plus (AI Associate, Administrator, Advanced Administrator, Platform App Builder, Data 360 Specialist, Agentblazer).

Note

This role is office-flexible, and the expectation is to be in-office a minimum of three (3) days per week.

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In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program. More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.

At Salesforce, we believe in equitable compensation practices that reflect the dynamic nature of labor markets across various regions.

The typical base salary range for this position is $171,200 - $273,300 annually.

There is a different range applicable to specific work locations. In California and New York, and select cities in the metropolitan areas of Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Washington DC, the base pay range for this role in those locations is $205,800 - $298,400 per year. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process.

The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.