A healthy relationship with the customers – is the success mantra for B2B SaaS businesses. Along with a customer-centric approach, businesses should invest in customer engagement activities to build healthy customer relationships. This is where customer engagement managers enter the scene.  

Customer engagement managers are responsible for building healthy relationships with customers. They are responsible for interacting with them, addressing their concerns, and being their (customers’) point of contact. On the other hand, they also oversee the work of other employees interacting with the customers. 

Considering the responsibilities handle, customer engagement managers play a critical client-facing role within an organization. However, there are still certain confusions and doubts about the roles and responsibilities of a customer engagement manager. 

This article discusses everything you need to know about the role. It covers –

1. Customer Engagement Manager vs. Customer Success Manger
2. Customer Engagement Manager: Roles and responsibilities 
3. Customer Engagement Manager: Skills required to be a successful customer engagement manage
4. Customer Engagement Manager: Work environment

Customer Engagement Manager vs. Customer Success Manger

There seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding these two roles. Both roles are extremely important, especially for SaaS companies. This makes it extremely important to know the difference between the two roles. 

Customer engagement manager and customer success manager are customer-facing roles and they involve direct interaction with the customers. However, the engagement manager’s role is more tactical and involves daily customer engagement at the same time, a customer success manager’s role is more strategic.

Another significant difference is that the Customer Engagement Manager is usually responsible for handling the technical implementations. At the same time, the Customer Success Manager is responsible for the overall growth of the company’s revenue. 

A Customer Engagement Manager’s job involves interacting with the current customers as well as the potential. They will have to manage the customer expectations and convey the same to relevant teams. They must nurture the customers while also giving them customers the leverage to choose. 

Customer Engagement Manager: Roles and responsibilities 

A customer engagement manager is responsible for a wide variety of roles and responsibilities. They include – 

1. Interact with customers, identify their needs, and suggest new products and services that suit their interests.
2. Interact with the customers and take their feedback regularly. 
3. Contribute to engagement ideas on the company’s social media pages.
4. Collaborate with different teams and monitor all aspects of the project, including communication, technology, development, and technology.
5. Lead various customer projects simultaneously and use different tools for the same.
6. Collect reviews and testimonials that appraise the brand image.
7. Create engaging marketing plans for new products and services 
8. Monitor the ongoing marketing campaigns and plan on making them more effective.
9. Document all the necessary details about the ongoing marketing campaigns and their effectiveness.
10. Providing excellent service and support to the existing customers to build healthy relationships with them.
11. Developing engaging business plans to approach new prospects.
12. Manage marketing and engagement campaigns on social media platforms.
13. Use advanced analytics and data from CRM to boost the response rates and show a compelling return on investment (ROI).
14. Execute customer engagement business analysis.
15. Develop training programs to help the associated staff to support company objectives and goals.
16. Analyzing sales data to identify new opportunities in new markets.
17. Conduct performance reviews and contribute towards resource management.

These are a few job roles and responsibilities of a customer engagement manager (CEMs). However, the role can also differ or become more defined based on the organization.  

Customer Engagement Manager: Skills required to be a successful customer engagement manager

Communication skills

As we have already discussed, the primary duty of a customer engagement manager is to interact with customers on a day-to-day basis. Considering this, communication skills are of primary importance to them. Using verbal and written communication skills, they are responsible for conveying messages to customers and feedback to respective teams.

Problem-solving skills

One of the job responsibilities of the customer engagement manager is to solve the customers’ problems. If the problem is out of their scope, the CEM should navigate it to the respective teams. This makes it a prerequisite for CEMs to have problem-solving skills. 

Relationship-building skills

The core job responsibility of customer engagement Managers involves building relations with the customers. They do this by interacting with the customers to understand their feedback and offering possible solutions (if necessary). Through different activities, customer engagement managers win over the customers’ confidence and make them feel more comfortable. This will also help them create a positive reputation for the brand and also ensure that the customers become recurring ones.

Analytical skills

As Customers, Engagement Managers have to listen to customers and interpret their communication. Further, they are responsible for drawing insights from the customer data and making critical decisions. In order to fulfill this, an ideal candidate for the CEM role must have good analytical skills. These skills are also very useful when the CEM has to build customer engagement strategies to meet the customer’s needs and desires. 

Leadership skills

Managers, in order to fulfill their job roles and responsibilities, need to have leadership qualities. This is also the case for CEMs. Customer engagement managers often lead teams, including customer service agents and sales representatives. Managing such teams and motivating them toward their goals is a huge task requiring leadership skills. Therefore, a CEM is expected to have managerial and leadership skills.

Attention to detail

Current-day customers seek personalization and prefer companies that address these needs. Taking care of this demand is also on the customer engagement managers. Observing things and paying attention to the details help CEMs be more personal in their approach. By paying attention to customer grievances, needs, and expectations, CEMs can personalize and customize customer services. At the same time, they can also help their company have the edge over the competition. Candidates applying for the Customer Engagement Manager role should often highlight the skills mentioned above when building their resumes.

Customer Engagement Manager: Work environment

The typical work environment of a customer engagement manager involves an office setup, and they may also have to travel to meet clients. The nature of their work is mostly dependent on the organization and the product. 

On a typical day, a Customer Engagement Manager (CEM) interacts with the customers and plans further engagement approaches. He/ she analyzes customer data and insights on the communication infrastructure to understand its performance levels. 

At the same time, the CEM guides the best practices and helps other employees with reporting and analytics to determine issues to address customers’ pain points.

Customer Engagement Manager: Best practices

Have a data-driven approach for decision-making

Using data when making critical decisions has become a norm in recent times. This practice has proven to provide accurate results. Customer engagement managers should use this to their advantage when making decisions and creating engagement strategies. For instance, they can build better engagement activities by analyzing the response trends on social media.

Emphasize employee engagement

Apart from engaging the customers, it is also important for customer engagement managers to focus on employee engagement. As they collaborate with different teams, they have the opportunity to keep the employees engaged, so they are happy and productive. This will have a positive impact on the organization as a whole.

Focus on delivering a personalized approach

We can’t stress more the fact that customers love personalized products/ services more. Customer engagement managers must use the same approach when interacting with customers. At the same time, they will also have to communicate the customers’ preferences to other teams so they can all contribute to it. 

Conclusion

The customer engagement manager is at the heart of customer engagement and contributes to healthy customer relationships. They are responsible for ensuring that the customer’s expectations are met. Considering this, investing in the right person for the role is important. 

Hope this blog helps you better understand the roles and responsibilities of a customer engagement manager. 

Happy hiring!

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