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When I first started my career in sales, little did I know about customer success teams. As my career transitioned, I realized the importance of a dedicated customer success manager (CSM).
A CSM guides customers from the sales process to the support stage. To get hired as a CSM, your job starts right away with crafting a compelling customer success manager resume.
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A CSM resume should ideally be more practical than aspirational; it should define your past roles and responsibilities, establish a professional timeline, and show your commitment to the client.
During my career, I’ve examined various CSM resumes and discovered the best practices over the years. In this blog, I’ll share my insights into writing a great resume and some of the best customer success resume templates to use.
What Does a Customer Success Manager Do?
A customer success manager is responsible for nurturing and maintaining the company’s relationships with its customers. They guide customers through the products or services to ensure that they feel valued and are retained for a long time.
A CSM role requires exceptional communication skills, empathy, time management, problem-solving, relationship building, and other additional skills.
A great CSM resume should be well-thought-out and talk to its potential employers by highlighting these skills.
Customer Success Manager Resume Best Practices
- Relate your work history and skills to the position you’re applying for.
- Support your role responsibilities and experiences with metrics and figures.
- Use action verbs.
Be it your customer success job or a sales job, these best practices will come in handy for writing a more approachable resume.
1. Relate your work history and skills to the position you’re applying for.
If you contextualize your experience to the new role, hiring managers and recruiters will know exactly how you stand in relation to job requirements and expectations. To do this, thoroughly read the job description and use keywords in your resume that align with the role's responsibilities.
2. Support your role responsibilities and experiences with metrics and figures.
Numbers are easier to read than words, and thus, using a metric can have a significant impact on the recruiter’s mind.
For example, you can say that you improved your customer satisfaction rate, but including your actual customer satisfaction rate and how you improved it makes that statement all the more powerful. I’ll go over examples of what this could look like below.
3. Use action verbs.
Action verbs are powerful in an approach that describes what you've done or are doing in a role or company. Instead of simply listing your roles, these verbs highlight your achievements or milestones.
For instance, I would suggest using action verbs such as “executed” or “coordinated” instead of “completed.”
How to Write a Customer Success Resume
1. Choose a resume template.
Your resume needs to be structured and follow an order that is easy to skim and easily gets into the recruiter's head.
The easiest way to begin creating your customer success resume is to start with a template. That way, the format is already set, and you simply have to input your experience, focusing on what will help you stand out from the crowd and prove your skills.
HubSpot offers a selection of free customer success resume templates that you can easily customize to your needs.
2. Note your education and contact information.
The first and easiest section to complete in your resume is your education and contact information. I care less about the educational background, but it is always a good idea to showcase your academics.
Again, use numbers such as your total marks or percentile to showcase your educational skills. Most resume templates have an education section covering undergraduate, school levels, and additional certifications.
Templates also include a space for contact information, where you can share your full name, phone number, email, and address.
If you’re building your resume from scratch, note that contact information and education are typically at the top of a resume.
3. Describe your work experience.
Your work experience should be an epicenter of your CSM resume. The work experience section covers all the companies that you’ve worked with, breaking down your roles and responsibilities.
Alongside your various experiences, highlight key achievements from every role.
Rohan Ratna, Customer Success Manager at WebEngage, highlights the importance of using numbers in your work experience.
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Ratna says, “Showcase your impact, not just your responsibilities, in your resume. Use metrics to reflect on the results and demonstrate the value you've added in your previous roles.”
For instance, you can use a quantity to display the growth in retention rates and the responsibilities around it. Instead of “Monitored customer success plans,” the following makes a much stronger statement: ”Increased onboarding success rates by 20%.”
I like the following CSM resume because it quantifies the work experience, highlighting the results achieved during her tenure:
When writing this section, the most important things to do are:
Describe your experience from your previous roles.
When describing your responsibilities in your previous role, it’s important to be specific with what you did. Let’s go over an example using the following two options:
Option 1: “Improved the customer experience.”
Option 2: “Monitored complaints and used customer insights to create a new onboarding process that reduces customer effort score.”
Option 2 is much more powerful because, like option 1, it says that you improved the customer experience, but it says exactly how you did it, giving hiring managers and recruiters more insight into your specific type of customer service experience.
It’s also important to use action verbs, so you’re specific in your responsibilities. For example, if you managed a project yourself, it's more impactful to say “Led,” “Managed,” or “Directed” than “worked on.”
Highlight the key achievements of your previous role.
As mentioned in the best practices section, using metrics to support your achievements is more impactful than just saying it with words. Let’s go over an example using the following two options:
Option 1: “Brought customers quick support.”
Option 2: “Provided customers with quick and relevant solutions to their needs, achieving a 96% customer satisfaction rate.”
Options 1 and 2 both say that you’re effective at bringing customers' support, but option 2 shows that customers are so satisfied that you have a high satisfaction rate. Essentially, you’re giving evidence of your success at that task.
Your work experience section is also a great place to highlight any awards or recognitions you received and what you accomplished to receive them.
4. Highlight your job-relevant skills.
Your work experience section displays your skills in action, but it’s also important to call attention to the most critical skills you have to help you meet the expectations of your new position.
Most recruiters start with the skills section and then hop onto the work experience section. Skills can be sorted into bullet points and tell a lot about the candidate’s competence.
You’ll know what is expected of you from the job description, and you can make sure to call out your related skills in a separate skills section.
This CSM resume, for example, lays down the skills that the candidate possesses. To bring further clarity, you can rate your skills through star ratings:
Some general customer success manager skills are:
- Maintaining a customer-first mindset
- Relationship management
- In-depth industry knowledge
- Communication
- Being an active listener
- Effective teaching and mentoring
- Critical thinking
- Strategic planning
- Data analysis
- Interpersonal skills
- Problem-solving
- Up-selling and preventing customer churn
- Customer account management
While you shouldn’t take things off of your resume, you can prioritize the skills that matter most. For example, if your primary experience is working at a call center and you’re stepping up to a general customer success manager role, highlight the transferable skills that will help you succeed.
Brooke Bayliss, CSM at VeUP, recommends listing these skills in order of your top strength. Brooke says, “Jot down your strengths as your top skills. Emphasize how you've used these skills to enhance customer success, foster long-term partnerships, and drive business growth.”
5. Include a summary.
A summary is not always required, but I recommend using one in your resume. It's a valuable tool for highlighting your experience, skills, and goals in a short and succinct sentence or two. It gives hiring managers a brief overview of who you are and what they can expect to learn more about as they continue reading.
Without a great summary, you might lose an opportunity to describe your candidature in your own words, especially if a cover letter isn’t accompanying your resume.
6. Proofread your resume.
This step is as important as writing your resume. I am an ardent grammar lover, and I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to spot the grammatical mistakes in a resume.
You want to ensure your resume is legible, understandable, and formatted correctly, and that there aren’t any glaring errors that take away from the impact of what you’ve included. The last thing you want is accidental grammatical errors to confuse a hiring manager so much or make you look so unprofessional that they don’t continue reading your resume.
Pro tip: Grammarly is a free, high-quality tool that can help with proofreading.
Ready, Set, Job Search!
A good resume will get you the job you’re applying for, especially if hiring managers and recruiters can see your experience and how you’ll apply it to your new role.
Here’s my suggestion: Plan your resume before deciding what to write. Create a rough structure and pick a resume template. Most importantly, never lie on your resume.
If you’re stuck at a point, consider hiring a resume writer and ensuring that your resume aligns with the job requirements.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2022 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
12 Free Customizable Resume Templates
Fill out this form to access your free professionally-designed templates, available on:
- Microsoft Word
- Google Docs
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- Google Slides
Download Free
All fields are required.
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