The context

Agorapulse is a self-service social media management tool. The two founders are French and the headquarters is based in Paris. Out of the 70 team members, 39 are based in Paris. All other team members work remotely all across the world. The second biggest country is the US where we have 15 team members.

Since our inception, in late 2011, we’ve always invested heavily on customer support. Our average response time in support is 20 minutes and we provide support 24/7. But support is a “reactive” communication and we’ve decided to invest in a more “pro-active” approach with our high-value customers ($199/month and above).

We’ve started to assemble a small customer success team made of team members who have had significant customer support experience, including the former head of support. We’ve also started to work on the framework and processes for that new function in the company.

We’re now looking for someone to take care of our customer success efforts for the French speaking market.

Location

The position is based in Paris.

Languages

The head of customer success must have impeccable mastering of the French and English languages. Another European language is a plus.

Management

For now, there is no team to manage yet. But as the team will grow, the first French Customer success manager would be organically the one who could lead the team. That’s why a previous management experience will be a big plus.

Positioning within the company’s organization

The French customer success manager will report directly to the Head of Customer Care. That may change in the future as we have a hard limit at 6 direct reports and have to adapt as we grow.

Training

In order to thrive in customer success, the French customer success manager will need to get in-depth knowledge of our product, its API ecosystem, the various support tools we use, our competitive landscape and our clients. This requires extensive training we expect will last from 4 to 6 months. This training will be done mostly by doing customer support and participating in sales demos. Obviously, there will also be customer success tasks and collaboration with the existing customer success team members, but training will be the priority in the beginning.

The day-to-day job

Ensuring the growth of our French market will require alignment between the following functions:

• Customer on boarding.
  One of the key goals of customer success is to ensure our new customers realize as much value as possible from using our tool. During the first 3 months following their subscription, we stay close to them using phone and email touch points to uncover potential issues and get them resolved and to offer training when appropriate.

• VIP treatment for enterprise clients
  We need to make sure all our Enterprise clients are experiencing the “white gloves” service they probably expect. It does mean we must anticipate any churn for this specific segment.

• Assisting customers in bad health.
  We’ve put a system in place to score our customers’ health and identify those who are not using our product to a healthy level. We reach out to these customers to ensure they’re not encountering issues and understand why their product usage is low. Based on what we learn, we take the necessary actions with them.

• Customer discovery / interviews.
  One of the priorities of customer success is to gather insights from our customers to nurture and prioritize our product roadmap. Each touch point is an opportunity to gather feedback and capture in a way that can help our product and marketing teams. We also propose each customer to participate in longer form interviews in exchange for Amazon gift cards. This part of the customer success job is crucial to build a better product (and business) in the future.

• Gathering insights from churned customers.
  We’ve built a system to track cancel reasons. Despite being mostly automated in many instances, we still reach out to churned customers to better understand the “real” reason. Understanding why customers churn is also crucial to help reduce churn in the future.

• Promoting new features/modules/add-ons to existing customers.
  One of our goals moving forward is to increase our ARPA. To get there, we’re going to develop new product add-ons and modules as well as new features that will be only available to certain plans. The customer success team will be in charge of presenting these features/add-ons/modules to existing clients and see if they could be of value to them. CS team members are co responsible of upsell with our sales team

Benefits
Health coverage (mutuelle complémentaire), ticket restaurant, central location (Chatelet les Halles / Rivoli), part time remote work possible after the training period. ( 1 or 2 days/week)

• At least 2 to 3 years experience in customer success/support at a self service BtoB SaaS business
• Past experience in managing a team is a big plus
• Strong ability to write and speak English & French
• Familiar with tools such as Salesmachine and Intercom
• Obsessed by customer service
• Confortable with calls and live demo, ready to answer any question or face any objection
• Impeccable communication skills
• Problem solver
• Strong organizational skills
• Goal- and results-driven
• Experience in the social media industry a big plus
• Strong team player but still a self-starter
• Thrives in a multitasking environment and can adjust priorities on the fly
• Able to work in a high energy, hyper-growth, startup environment
• Eager to learn, adapt and perfect your work; you seek out help and put it to good use