As a recruitment firm that works with tech startups and scale-ups, we are often tasked with recruiting first-time leadership hires and during the process the question inevitably arises, “what should I call them?”
To help CEO/Founders determine which title to choose when hiring for a leadership position, we have created a five-part Checklist to Simplify Titles series.
In this edition, we will cover the basics to help you determine which title you should choose when hiring a Customer Success leader:
COO
- Reports to the Board and/or Founder/CEO
- Board involvement
- Global scope
- Often hired to participate in a pivot/reset/turn around or to scale the business to achieve an outcome
- Champions a philosophy and embodies a way of thinking that spurs others to create raving fans and advocates. They are the VoC for the business, experience PoV, and concerned with loyalty/retention
- Leads other leaders
- Functions reporting into this role could include customer success, customer experience, service design, customer support or call centers, and operations
- Focuses on the business objective and the customer experience across all touchpoints and channels
VP Customer Success
- Reports to a CEO/Founder or COO
- Participates in company "town halls" as the functional leader
- They are the highest point of escalation
- This person leads a team of individual contributors or Directors who own: customer success and possibly customer support; sometimes growth (upsell/cross-sell) as well
- Moves across strategy and execution seamlessly and "rolls up their sleeves" when necessary
- Engages with the market
Hiring a Head of Customer Success? Make sure they have these 5 most coveted traits
Head of Customer Success
- Reports to the Founder/CEO
- This title typically exists in young modern tech startups
- Usually the first CS hire and does "everything" post sales: onboarding, ensuring success of the go-live, follow up, account management, possibly growth or identifying growth opportunities for the sales team to run with
- Often a scrappy persona as they are hands-on
- If they lead others, they may be a small number of CS Managers
- They work cross-functionally with everyone:
- sales for opportunities they identify
- product management as they are the feedback loop
- technical teams for support issues/problems
- This title could be applied to attract a senior-level individual contributor or as part of a retention strategy