DescriptionThe OpportunityThe Manager of Client Services is a pivotal leadership position overseeing customer operations across our premier email deliverability brands: Email Industries and Kickbox. This role is designed for an experienced Customer Success Leader or Team Lead ready to step into a strategic management role within a high-impact, smaller-scale SaaS environment.
You will bridge the gap between proactive account management, reactive technical support, and commercial growth. By leading the established CSM team at Email Industries, building and guiding the newly formed CSM team at Kickbox, and managing our agile support teams, you will ensure our clients receive world-class deliverability expertise and service. Your mission is to advocate for the customer, manage high-level escalations, optimize contract renewals, and coach the teams toward hitting aggressive retention and operational targets.
Key ResponsibilitiesTeam Leadership & Coaching- Dual-Brand Management: Lead, mentor, and align the Customer Sucess Team at Email Industries and the newly forming Customer Success team at Kickbox.
- Support Oversight: Direct and support our small technical support team, fostering collaboration between reactive troubleshooting and proactive account management.
- Professional Development: Act as a hands-on coach rather than just a "manager," helping team members develop their consultative skills in email deliverability and account strategy.
Escalation & Customer Operations- Primary Point of Escalation: Serve as the senior escalation point for both high-level customer success relationship issues and critical technical support bottlenecks.
- Problem Resolution: Unblock technical and relational issues quickly by collaborating directly with deliverability consultants, engineers, and support reps.
Commercial & Contract Management- Contract Proposals & Renewals: Take ownership of the commercial pipeline for renewals, draft custom contract proposals, and conduct strategic pricing reviews to protect and grow account values.
- Value-Based Pricing: Work closely with finance and product teams to review account tiers, ensuring pricing aligns with customer consumption and ROI.
Cross-Functional Liaison- Customer Advocacy: Represent the voice of the customer across Product, Engineering, Deliverability, and Billing departments.
- Product Roadmap Alignment: Translate recurring client feedback and support pain points into actionable feature requests for the Kickbox and Email Industries product teams.
Reporting, Forecasting & R.E.G.O Strategy- Data-Driven Performance: Own and track the R.E.G.O metric framework, pulling weekly performance reports on health scores, support metrics, and revenue risks.
- Revenue Forecasting: Provide weekly revenue, expansion, and churn risk forecasts directly to senior leadership.
Customer Support Excellence & AI Advocacy- Partner closely with the teams, ensuring they have the technical infrastructure, training, and strategic backing to deliver support excellence.
- Serve as the AI Advocate for customer support- scouting, testing, and implementing cutting-edge AI technologies, automated workflows, and streamlined support protocols to drive down resolution times and backlog.
- Oversee the evolution of internal documentation, ticketing systems, and customer-facing knowledge bases to increase self-service capabilities.
Vendor, Expense & Contract Management- Contract Review: Regularly review third-party software, platforms, and vendor contracts utilized by the customer success department.
- Renewal Ownership: Maintain a ledger of vendor renewal dates and negotiate optimal terms to maximize ROI on internal CS tooling.
- Expense Management: Actively identify areas for cost reduction, consolidation of redundant platforms across the 3 brands, or reallocation of budget to high-impact resources.
Performance Framework & Targets- You will run the client services department using the R.E.G.O framework, adapted for our email verification and deliverability SaaS models:
Retain (Retention Focus)- Gross Revenue Retention (GRR): Target < 3% Gross MRR Churn.
Retention Strategy:
- Proactively identify at-risk senders (e.g., those experiencing deliverability drops or volume changes) and initiate mitigation plans.
Grow (Expansion Focus)
- Net Revenue Retention (NRR): Target 101% NRR across both brands.
Expansion Proposals:
- Drive account expansion through upselling deliverability consulting services, higher-tier verification packages, and API integrations.
Engage (Relationship Focus)
- Contact Activity: 90% engagement rate (ensuring consistent touchpoints, deliverability audits, and executive business reviews).
- Product Adoption: 70% active platform usage (driving consistent use of Kickbox verification credits and Email Industries monitoring tools).
- Customer Satisfaction: Maintain a CSAT of 90% across both CS and support interactions.
Optimize (Efficiency Focus)
- Support Resolution Time: First-response time < 4 hours, full resolution time < 40 hours.
- Ticket Queue Management: Keep the active ticket backlog < 100 open tickets across both brands through workflow optimization and coaching.
- Must work in tight alignment with these teams, ensuring smooth escalation of growth opportunities.
Job Qualifications- SaaS Experience: 4+ years of experience in Customer Success or Account Management within a B2B SaaS environment. Experience in email marketing, email deliverability, ISP relations, or email verification is highly preferred.
- Ready to Step Up: Proven experience as a Customer Success Team Lead or early stage career in the Management of Customer Success or Client Services . This is an ideal role for someone with the tactical skills ready to take on formal people management.
- Commercial Acumen: Strong experience handling contract renewals, drafting client proposals, and managing pricing reviews/negotiations.
- Escalation Handling: Calm under pressure; proven ability to step into difficult customer situations (both relational and technical support issues) and steer them to a positive resolution.
- Analytical & Data-Driven: Highly comfortable using data (specifically R.E.G.O-style metrics) to forecast churn, evaluate team performance, and make strategic decisions.Communication & Collaboration: Superb stakeholder management skills; capable of working smoothly with technical deliverability experts, developers, billing managers, and senior executives.
Compensation Range Ziff Davis provides a range for the base pay. Factors that may be used to determine your actual pay may include your specific job related knowledge, skills, experience, and geographic location. The salary compensation for this role is S100,000-120,000 OTE CAD Individual pay within the compensation range for this business unit specific role is determined based on a variety of factors including experience, scope of the role, capabilities to perform the role, education and training, as well as business and company performance.
