Senior Customer Success Manager

The Opportunity:  

The Customer Success Organization is focused on helping athena’s mid-sized customers derive the full value of their athena products and services. We build and manage effective relationships with customers owners, executives, operational and physician leadership stakeholders, communicating the value of our services in the context of customers’ business goals with the goal of retaining high performing, satisfied customers. We identify risks to customer satisfaction proactively and collaborate across the entire Customer Success organization to tenaciously pursue solutions and advocate for our customers. The Senior Customer Success Manager is charged with ensuring that both the customer and athena performs all the duties and responsibilities under each party’s purview in athena’s unique co-sourcing model.   

Position Summary:  
As a Senior Customer Success Manager you will be responsible for ensuring the complete post-sale success and satisfaction of your assigned $10-15M+ book of athenahealth customers through establishing yourself as a trusted advisor and business partner.  This role involves supporting one the largest Orthopedic customer(s) providing a unique opportunity within the team.  The Customer Success Manager is engaged throughout the customer’s athenahealth journey, focused on value maximization, building and managing effective relationships that promote growth, loyalty and thus retention.  

The Customer Success Manager works closely with customer executives and decision makers to understand their business model, current challenges and goals and leverages network insights that drives optimal financial and operational performance.  The Customer Success Manager mitigates risks and proactively identifies and communicates how athena’s features add value to their business for growth, achieving priorities and resolving pain points.   

Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to:  

70% Develop and maintain a strong relationship with customer’s operational leadership   

• Ultimate responsibility and accountability for customer satisfaction and revenue retention within assigned book of accounts  

• Tailor a success plan for each customer that aligns with their business goals and coordinate appropriate internal domain experts for delivery including partnering with training, consulting, and support teams to ensure the customer is successful  

• Effectively network and build trusting relationships with customer operational leadership including conducting a regular cadence of performance reviews  

• Use network specialty specific benchmarks and insights to identify opportunities and recommend appropriate configuration and workflow best practices  

• Proactively anticipate and identify risks, opportunities, and impact on customer satisfaction and retention and initiate appropriate mitigations.  

• Maintain day-to-day relationships with assigned customer(s) by collecting and clarifying information with all impacted parties, communicating project or program plans and progress, and responding to customer questions and requests.  

• Maintain a comprehensive understanding of shifting business challenges faced by customers and common objectives and appropriately map those to the value proposition of their purchased athenahealth functionality to address their needs  

• Organize and manage complex initiatives across athenahealth and customer teams to optimize performance and use of athenahealth solutions.  

• Ensure ongoing adoption of a customer’s existing athenahealth products  

• Raise opportunities for growth to the account’s Account Executive  

• Maintain an understanding of and ability to discuss changes in the healthcare industry and marketplace  

• Manage executive governance process in collaboration with athena and customer leadership and Account Executive  

• Understand and represent customer priorities to the Voice of Customer function, acting as a customer advocate where appropriate  

• Provide transparency into the Product Roadmap and the Voice of the Customer process and support an accurate impact assessment and setting expectations with customer leadership including having difficult conversations when functionality is not on the product roadmap  

• Partner with customer leadership to ensure overall success of all customer selected quality programs  

30% Drive Initiatives and Mitigate Risk  

• Coach customers to ensure they are utilizing all available athenahealth resources including customer support, training, and the customer community including monitoring trends in issues and recommending internal resources to improve the root cause  

• Apply project management and cross-departmental influence working with the customer and athena teams to establish priorities and drive resolution for escalated customer issues coordinating internal and external teams as necessary and documenting appropriately  

• Assess and prioritize issues that may lead to customer dissatisfaction leveraging internal domain expertise to ensure a strong mitigation plan is in place  

Education, Experience, & Skills Required:   

• Bachelor’s Degree preferred  

• Executive-level communication and interpersonal skills are a must, with the ability to effectively & independently navigate conflict and foster honest dialogue  

• 5-10 years of professional experience including working knowledge of healthcare revenue cycle and/or EMR in a sales, services, or operations role  

• A demonstrated history of accomplishment in a leadership capacity or successful change management  

• Demonstrated expertise in managing projects by overseeing timelines, coordinating teams, and ensuring successful delivery aligned with organizational objectives 

Preferred requirements  

• CRM Experience (specifically, Salesforce.com and Gainsight)  

• Experience with and knowledge of athenaOne services Service and relationship experience with athena customers 

• Orthopedic/Physical Therapy experience a plus, but not required 

• Previous Healthcare experience a plus  

Behaviors & Abilities Required:   

• Ability to work independently as well as part of an extended, cross-functional team  

• Manage customer relationship ensuring expectations and deliverables are documented and met, key stakeholders are informed and customer satisfaction is achieved  

• Ability to independently negotiate mutually beneficial outcomes for customers and athena  

• Self-driven, results-oriented with a positive outlook  

• Proactively manage issues and communications  

• Ability to identify work prioritization and guide others  

• Take initiative with little to no direction  

• Be transparent and honest in a positive, professional and polite manner  

• Conflict Resolution Skills  

• Empathic communicator with a consultative approach, able to see things from other person's point of view  

• Skilled at driving to success regardless of individual level of subject matter expertise.  

• Ability to travel as needed, typically 30%, including onsite partnership meetings & industry event coverage