Customer Success Manager Review

Daily I am involved in communicating with customers, finding out what their needs are, figuring out how we can support them and determining actions to follow this. Primarily, my work aims to educate customers about how they can get the most out of what they have paid for and how it can have the greatest impact on their organisation. I am the customer's main point of call if they are having issues utilising their products or would like to learn more.

This role definitely helps to improve your communication and presentation skills. When talking to a customer you need to be confident in what you are talking about because they trust you to be the expert. You also have to be very organised and self disciplined because you are constantly interacting with multiple customers on completely different topics and need to be able to stay on top of it all. I have also learned how to communicate as part of a team as every customer has a lot of different employees who are there to support in different ways, and you need to make sure that you can collaborate with them well too.

A lot of responsibility. I have been handed some of my own projects to run, I can come to my team for help but I am ultimately the project leader on these. Because you're interacting with real customers and a lot of the role is similar to what a regular employee would do I do feel like I have a responsibility. You are supported throughout but you are expected to manage projects very early on.

My team were very supportive from the beginning of my internship. Everybody is friendly and understands that this is some people's first corporate job and may struggle, and always offer to teach or support you if needed. Even though we have responsibility there is also the understanding that we dont have the same industry experience as normal employees so we aren't held to the same expectation, but are given the opportunity to do a lot.

The company has a very inclusive and supportive culture. They company is a big promoter of diversity and inclusion and that is evidenced by the efforts made by the corporate team as well as all employees. The culture is also heavily focused on learning, on placement a lot of time and resources are dedicated towards our learning but this is also happening for all employees. Especially in response to Covid, there is an increase in efforts to support employee's wellbeing, including introduction of optional well being sessions and extra time off to allow people to recharge and disconnect from work.

I very much enjoyed my placement year. I was given the right balance of work and responsibility where it challenged me to improve myself, develop my skills as well as still being considerate of me being new to corporate working and not having many skills coming into the role. I was also given plenty of opportunities to do things that I was passionate about outside of my usual day to day role which made each day more interesting as well as making me feel like was having more impact.

Yes

Focus on yourself and why you would work well at the company. The culture is massively diverse and inclusive so there is no need to worry about whether you will fit in or if you meet a criteria. They are also understanding of the fact you will have little experience in the sector and want to teach you the skills rather than expecting you to come already already skilled up. Focus more on why you want to do good, what you are passionate about and how Microsoft may be a good platform for you to leverage to help you achieve this.