Customer Success Manager, Payroll - Emerging Accounts

Fourth•Austin, TX

6d•Remote

About The Position

The Customer Success Manager, Payroll owns adoption, retention, and expansion for Fourth’s large and medium-sized Payroll and PEO accounts. This role focuses on a smaller, higher-complexity portfolio compared to the general Emerging CSM book. These accounts have greater regulatory exposure, higher payroll run complexity, and a higher churn cost per account. Therefore, the role emphasizes depth over volume, requiring fewer accounts, deeper payroll/PEO domain expertise, and closer collaboration with Payroll Operations, Tax, and Benefits teams. This is a specialist track within the CSM level, with scope, financial authority, and outcomes ownership matching the standard CSM tier. The key differentiator is domain expertise: this CSM must accurately distinguish between Payroll, PEO, Tax, and Benefits issues, identify compliance-critical situations, and route them appropriately to prevent churn.

Requirements

1–3+ years of experience in customer success or account management specifically with payroll, PEO, or HCM accounts.
Working understanding of Payroll and/or PEO fundamentals (wage/hour basics, tax filing cadence, benefits administration) sufficient to distinguish Payroll, PEO, Tax, and Benefits issues correctly when triaging.
Experience supporting large or medium-sized accounts (higher complexity, lower volume).
Comfort operating under compliance-critical escalation protocols.
Proficiency in Salesforce.
Exceptional written/verbal communication skills; able to explain payroll and compliance topics clearly to non-technical customer stakeholders.
Data-driven mindset for interpreting payroll accuracy and filing-timeliness metrics against each customer’s stated objective.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with Zendesk and NetSuite.
Comfortable using AI-enabled CS/adoption tooling (health scoring, workflow automation) as part of daily account management.

Responsibilities

Own an assigned portfolio of approximately 75–125 large and medium-sized Payroll and PEO accounts throughout the customer lifecycle, from onboarding to renewal.
Define the value moment for each account in payroll-specific terms (e.g., first clean payroll run, accurate tax setup, on-time filing, compliant benefits enrollment) and track progress against these objectives.
Partner with Payroll Operations, Tax, and Benefits teams to monitor onboarding progress and ensure customers achieve payroll-specific adoption milestones.
Monitor payroll accuracy rate and filing timeliness as leading indicators of customer health.
Correctly distinguish Payroll, PEO, Tax, and Benefits issues when triaging customer concerns.
Flag compliance-critical issues immediately per the 24-hour escalation SLA, ensuring Compliance Lead and Legal sign-off before resolution.
Identify and flag expansion opportunities and renewal risk to the CSM Manager or Sales/Account Management.
Flag PEO at-risk accounts with elevated urgency due to the company-level dependency on PEO retention.
Own payroll accuracy rate, time to first clean/successful payroll run, filing and compliance timeliness, and PEO account retention within the assigned portfolio.
Adhere to SLA (24-hour triage) and maintain high CSAT.
Identify trends in payroll/PEO-specific customer challenges and suggest improvements to process, documentation, and automation.
Utilize AI-enabled adoption and health-scoring tools tuned to payroll-specific signals to identify risk and expansion opportunities.
Maintain accurate and current records in Salesforce (primary CRM), and Zendesk/NetSuite as needed.
Operate independently with minimal day-to-day supervision, working cross-functionally with Payroll Operations, Tax, Benefits, Support, and Sales.