Customer Success Manager

Cisco•Houston, TX

4d•Remote

About The Position

The Customer Success & Risk Management role is responsible for driving the successful adoption and utilization of Cisco technologies to ensure customer value realization and growth, proactively handling and mitigating renewal risks in alignment with the renewals team by demonstrating risk insights and adoption action plans to increase retention rates, and supporting customer expansion through finding opportunities for deeper product utilization and aligning technology to evolving business needs. This position develops and maintains strong technical influence with customer team members through product demonstrations and consultative sessions to address business challenges and objectives, leads alignment workshops to review adoption progress and drive customer outcomes for successful onboarding, adoption, and renewals, and acts as a technology evangelist by providing feedback from customers to Cisco's product teams to advise product development and improvements. The role also includes crafting and implementing technical adoption plans (TAPs) that align with customer goals to maximize technology investments, staying informed of delivered services and available software, directing customer requests to appropriate teams for resolution of adoption barriers, and collaborating with sales, customer success, delivery, renewals, and business entities to identify use cases that drive value and business outcomes. Additionally, the role requires staying up-to-date with the latest Cisco technologies, including AI, ML, automation, and cloud technologies, as well as maintaining awareness of the competitive landscape and industry trends to provide guide mentorship to customers.

Requirements

Bachelors + 8 years of related experience, or Masters + 6 years of related experience, or PhD + 3 years of related experience, or Equivalent relevant work experience
Professional level (e.g., CCNP) or equivalent relevant certification encouraged.

Responsibilities

Handles a portfolio with complex or strategic accounts, often with multiple team members (multi-product, multi-region, multi-stakeholder)
May supervise sophisticated, multi-workstream adoption initiatives, utilizing AI-tools to predict adoption challenges and driving value realization cadence and implementing risk‑mitigation strategies throughout the lifecycle
Impacts across teams (e.g., standardization, playbook build)
Leverages deep technical knowledge across multiple products and solutions, acting as a technology evangelist to customers
Leads health checks and adoption accelerators; codifies standards for scale
Acts as a pilot user or early adopter of new AI / automation features to validate usefulness; proposes and drives small internal innovation experiments (e.g. automating health checks, anomaly detection)
Champions the use of AI tools to synthesize feedback and adoption data for ongoing improvement
Owns technical adoption strategy within their specialization and complete core adoption motions without reliance on CSSs
Collaborates with peers and cross-functional teams to share field insights and support enablement efforts
Uses CS’ feedback tools to log adoption barriers, recognizes trends around recurring customer challenges, and surfaces to CXM/others as appropriate
Leads end‑to‑end orchestration of CS adoption initiatives across programs and partners, crafting sophisticated transformation roadmaps and driving adoption patterns that span multiple technologies and engage cross-functional teams
Guides adoption efforts with minimal oversight and mentors others on TAP quality and telemetry usage
Drives renewals interlock cadence and delivers de‑risk and adoption strategies at scale; proactively surfaces and qualifies expansion, renewal, and new‑business opportunities applying adoption insights, and routes to Sales/Renewals
Systematically scales and streamlines through reuse, modular playbooks, automation of routine tasks
Engages regularly, and through onsite meetings, with customers’ senior leaders as a dialog partner and to shape strategic adoption plan
Lead alignment workshops; steers outcome roadmaps and executive updates; raises adoption risks with clear owners
Partners with customers to co-create proactive and predictive, personalized adoption journeys
Influences cross-functional internal teams (Product, Engineering, Sales) based on customer priorities
Guides pooled CSS and partner resources; sets cadence and governance for adoption plans and value reviews
Guides internal process improvements and pilots new ways of working
Leads cross-functional working groups involving CS, product, operations
Acts as a liaison across accounts, regions, or functional initiatives, ensuring a “one-team” customer experience
Maintains awareness of overlapping service engagements and other CSM teams, coordinating only where directly tied to software adoption plans
Provides field insights that influence pricing and packaging strategies
Identifies growth opportunities from adoption signals and partners with Sales on qualification and forecasting inputs (not direct funnel ownership)
Collaborates with Finance, Sales, and Operations to align software renewal targets and growth levers

Benefits

medical, dental and vision insurance
a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
paid parental leave
short and long-term disability coverage
basic life insurance
10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco
16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees (non-exempt employees)
flexible vacation time off program (exempt employees)
80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next
Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members
Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
annual bonuses (for non-sales roles)
performance-based incentive pay (for sales roles)