Customer Success Specialist - People Leader

What You’ll Do
The Customer Success Specialist (CSS) Manager role is a critical, strategic advisor, player / coach and technical authority that engages with customers to accelerate their adoption of Cisco products & solutions that transform their business and drive business outcomes. This role within Cisco’s Customer Experience (CX) organization is responsible for leading a group of CSSs who own delivery of targeted engagements intended to increase product awareness, share standard methodologies, and drive overall product consumption and business value. The player / coach requires CSS manager to play dual role where the individual will support customers like any other CSS and will develop team of CSS’s.
You are also a hands-on authority for their aligned product or architecture. The role brings strategic vision and tactical expertise to ensure every customer engagement is a success while also actively participating in the global CSS Community where they collaborate with their peers to share standard methodologies and customer success stories. The CSS is able to effectively combine technical knowledge with solid grasp of business priorities to provide consultative solutions pivotal to helping customers realize value faster. As a leader of these teams, this role will be accountable for ensuring customers are successfully accepting and realizing value from Cisco’s solutions and directly delivering customer engagements as needed.
This is a highly technical role intended to support our customers with a myriad of their adoption challenges across the following product domains: Networking, Security, Data Center, and Collaboration.
Who You’ll Work With
The CSS will build close relationships with customers, CX counterparts, architects, & engineers in achieving their goals. The role will:

• Demonstrate domain specialization and expertise to authoritatively identify and proactively handle risk areas and customer expectations that could impact successful delivery
• Drive adoption and expansion of Cisco products by highlighting feature opportunities, winning use cases and relevant strategies to customers and the Success team
• A willingness to travel 20-30% as needed.
• Lead a team of Customer Success Specialists across the Enterprise Networking Architecture
• Contribute to product and offer improvement by providing lifecycle feedback to CX Product Management and CX Success Programs Teams
• Collaborate with Account teams, CS, Partners to improve customer adoption, address product concerns, and drive incremental growth
• Deliver accelerators and ATX (Ask-the-Expert) to diverse set of customers that qualify, tailoring work you're doing and producing quantifiable business outcomes with scope and timely engagement.
• Facilitate high impact, technology-specific workshops targeted at all levels of an organization to accelerate a business initiative, potentially in conjunction with the Customer Success Executive (CSE)
• Inspire customers to make tactical and strategic deployment decisions and supervise long term business outcomes
• Be responsible for voicing support for the end-to-end CX offer strategy and roadmap to sales specialists, delivery teams, and customers

Who You Are

• Business Insight- clear understanding of high-level business landscape including key strategic priorities, processes, and driven marketplace
• First Responder: Skilled at issue management and handling customer expectations.
• Effective Communicator: Delivers sophisticated information in a confident and convincing manner, appropriate to a diverse audience that produces transparency and impact.
• Results Oriented: Interest in and validated execution ability with relevant technologies and customer outcomes.
• Cross-Team Collaborator & Influencer –work across internal and external teams of all levels to proactively inspire technical implementation decisions and work towards common goal. Ability to operate and work well with customers in a remote / virtual and face-to-face environment (varies by role).
• Technical Specialist: Deep technical knowledge with ability to understand and connect customer use cases/plans with Cisco solutions and how Cisco solutions can be efficiently applied in a customer’s environment to accelerate customer value. A drive for continued learning in new technologies, functionality, and industry standard methodologies
• Customer Obsessed: Proactively understands customer needs and aligns architectural and vertical expertise to multi-functional teams to drive alignment on decisions that enhance customer value.
• Leader: Ability to form and lead teams. Exceptional team-building and time management skills. Consistent track record in establishing new organizations, procedures, and offerings.

Required Experience

• Comparable experience from the GES Customer Success Specialist team is strongly preferred
• Skilled at building high performance teams, developing people and creating a shared vision
• Effective and shown people management, leadership, and conflict management skills
• Experience of improving productivity and efficiency in processes
• Demonstrates strategic and tactical skills in the area of operational excellence
• Current Grade 11
• Extraordinary ability to work multi-functionally and building business partnerships with customers
• Extensive understanding of the technical fundamentals of aligned technology/specialization areas, including features and use cases, and an ability to define and articulate how technology can be used to tackle business challenges

Desired qualifications

• Suggested Industry Certifications: CISM / CISSP or equivalent
• Cisco Success Management certifications: Cisco Certified Success Specialist
• BS Engineering, Computer Science, Masters
• Cisco technical Certifications: CCNA / CCNP / CCDP/ CCIE or equivalent

If you are looking for hands-on involvement in crafting the future direction of Cisco and Customer Experience, we have a place for you.
We Are Cisco
#WeAreCisco, where each person is unique, but we bring our talents to work as a team and make a difference. Here’s how we do it.
We accept digital, and help our customers implement change in their digital businesses. Some may think we’re “old” (30 years strong!) And only about hardware, but we’re also a software company. And a security company. An AI/Machine Learning company. We even invented an intuitive network that adapts, predicts, learns and protects. No other company can do what we do – you can’t put us in a box!
But “Digital Transformation” is an empty buzz phrase without a culture that allows for innovation, creativity, and yes, even failure (if you learn from it.)
Day to day, we focus on the give and take. We give our best, we give our egos a break, and we give of ourselves (because giving back is built into our DNA.) We take accountability, we take daring steps, and we take difference to heart. Because without diversity of thought and a commitment to equality for all, there is no moving forward.
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