What is a Customer Engagement Manager? Their Roles and Skills?

Why is it urgent to hire a customer engagement manager for your company right now?

Building a complete customer engagement strategy is no longer an option, but is becoming one of the essential needs of every business looking to stay competitive in a growing market where the competition to attract customers between brands is on the rise today. Some minor, fragmented practices can affect mostly nothing to the enhancement of the big picture or boost the customer engagement.

Studies have shown that companies formulating a complete customer engagement strategy improved engagement by 22%, revenue increased from 13% to 51%, and also increased sales from 5% to 85%. Research from the Rockefeller Corporation found that 68% of customers will no longer return to buy products or services of a business if they think the business is not engaging with them. 

When done well and properly, stimulating strong and sustainable customer engagement would drive brand growth, attract potential customers, and increase loyalty to existing customers. Businesses focus on customer engagement focused on creating value. They give people something meaningful beyond a sales pitch: a great end-to-end customer experience, great content, or interactive real-time customer support. 

And to ensure that every business or company customer engagement activity goes on smoothly, consistently from start to finish, businesses face many difficulties because of the lack of a comprehensive management position that can cover all activities to increase the customer engagement rate of the business. And that’s where the customer engagement manager position came in. The demand for this profession is growing rapidly along with the urgent need of formulating a complete customer engagement strategy for the business and is gradually becoming a profession trend in the future. 

Customer management manager career overview

“Should I become a customer engagement manager?” may be the question of many before making decisions to set foot in this highly competitive but also rewarding field. May the practical data and numbers included in this section help you get an overall view of the big picture of the customer engagement career. In comparison to other jobs, the customer engagement career has a fairly fast rate of growth at approximately 5% across a period of 10 years between 2018 and 2028 (statistics collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics). As a matter of fact, the opportunities of customer engagement managers that are foreseen to open up by the year of 2028 is roughly 21,000.

As speaking of the salary, a customer engagement manager makes on average $54.3 per hour, a fairly large amount of money compared to other professions, making the total salary per year $112,947. In addition, the range of the total amount that a customer engagement manager earns per year falls between $86,000 to $148,000.

And similar to most jobs that arise in today’s competitive profession market, it often takes a lot of work and effort to become the customer engagement manager. It’s not uncommon to see people changing their minds about their dream of becoming a customer engagement manager after working in this field for a while. But with the base of customer engagement manager skills required and trained throughout the process of working as the customer engagement manager, you are granted a variety of alternative professions that share the same set of skills and knowledge such as project coordinators, customer service supervisor, account manager, customer service manager, customer service director, and the list goes on.

What is a customer engagement manager?

What is a customer engagement manager position? In general, the customer engagement manager is responsible for creating and maintaining important relationships with customers, both potential and existing customers of the business. Their role is to act as an essential connection point between the company and the customer. This connection point will provide customers with a great experience, ensure the legal terms of the contract and allocate resources properly to ensure satisfactory resolution of problems as well as negative feedback from the customer side. As a manager of the customer engagement department, you need to help your team win and keep your customer’s business.

In particular, after a customer signs the contract confirming using the business’s products or services, the customer engagement managers have the responsibility of making and sustaining a positive connection with them. Which includes resolving and clarifying any problems that the customers are running into, managing the customer’s expectations about the brand and the business. Other main duties that the customer engagement managers may need to care for in a day of working may be allocating the business resources to satisfy the customers and coordinating closely with the sales department. Depending on the characteristics of the company, the positions may be responsible for providing insightful reports or data on the progress of the project. 

Working as a customer engagement manager means you have to keep updating and growing your current portfolio to sign more contracts with your customers while sustaining the existing ones. As speaking of qualifications, the employer may require a bachelor’s degree in business, marketing or other related fields from the customer engagement manager applicants. The skills like multitasking to take part in various tasks at once, problem-solving to address the customers’ dilemmas, communicating effectively with customers are also a must if you’re wishing to ground a position in this competitive trending career.

Responsibilities of a customer engagement manager

As mentioned above, the customer engagement manager roles and responsibilities can be described as the mission to act as an essential connection point between the company and the customer. This connection point will provide customers with a great experience, ensure the legal terms of the contract and allocate resources properly to ensure satisfactory resolution of problems as well as negative feedback from the customer side. Additionally, as a manager, you also need to demonstrate the ability to manage and encouraging the team while adhering to the company’s regulations and policies.

Here are some regular responsibilities that a customer engagement manager needs to perform on a regular basis in their roles in the business environment:

• Recommend customers which is the most effective approach to choose to optimize their ROI.
• Manage all elements of the project such as technology utilization, communications, training, development.
• Manage the development team to establish applications functioning on the Internet.
• Analyze the direction from the board of senior directors and the overall goals of the business to launch effective social media marketing campaigns.
• Make full use of applications like SharePoint and Microsoft technologies and tools to lead various customer projects simultaneously.
• Manage a system of corporate audit and assessment used in recovery.
• Collect and analyze regular reviews of the business and important customers in order to better understand projects in the future and customer’s expectations.
• Meetup with the important partners and stakeholders to discuss strategic logistics plans to minimize the delivery cycle.
• Make use of high-tech analysis tool, working on CRM and business intelligence to improve the response rate.
• Forecast the market trends and tendencies, execute market analysis, product research and development, order management, and logistics.
• Propose various training solutions to boost the key metrics used to evaluate the performance.
• Cross-collaboration with internal teams neutralize issues effectively and efficiently and deliver on customer KPI.
• Conduct regular incident reviews and report to develop metrics recording system and sum up reporting on incidents occur.
• Research and develop briefs involving creative packaging, in-store design, website, fanpage and other digital and social media executions.
•  Install a system of cross-functional communication to guarantee customer satisfaction on the products and assess the quality of assurance metrics.
• Develop detailed data analysis in support of cash forecast variance spreadsheets.
• Provide customers with great experience and service, efficiently implement the procedures and policies of the company into executing an innovative process.
• Take part in managing RfPs, RfQs and RfIs.
• Coordinate to work on designing and utilize touch screen POS.
• Formulate market penetration strategies and manage the relationship with important partners.

What does it take to become a customer engagement manager?

According to a study conducted recently, 54% of customer engagement managers are demonstrating proficiency in certain skill sets: business units, direct reports, and project management. As speaking of soft skills, people grounding these positions are often associated with analytical skills, effective communication skills, and customer support skills.

Professional skills

We will provide the proportion of customer engagement managers possessing the skills listed above on their CV here:

• Direct reports: 21%

Lead a team of seniors, experienced direct reports and dotted line reports from various regions as well.

• Business units: 54%

Offer regular reports or presentations on the status of different business units, take part in training for organizations, figure out their current priorities and work on the solutions

• Project management: 5%

Complete project management courses or programs at reputable universities

• Customer service: 3%

Manage a team of 10-30 customer engagement executives working on the process of improving customer service and performance management of the organization.

• Cloud: 2%

Managed implementation of proof of concept for Cloud initiative including integration into the remedy for approval management.

• Business Objectives: 1%

Operate complicated full-service outsourcing initiatives to provide customers with enhanced value and help them accomplish their vital business goals.

Personality traits & soft skills

“Business units”, “direct reports” are often listed on the resumes of customer engagement managers applicants as types of skills. We are going to look for more details on which is the most important skill or personality trait that a customer engagement manager needs to perform well.

Many argue that it’s customer service skills that are the most important personality characteristics of every customer engagement manager. Take this line from a resume of a company as a practical example about the skill, “customer engagement managers need to perform the proficiency of listening and responding to the issues or expectations of the customers”. In addition, many other resumes indicated that the customer engagement managers with customer service skills can facilitate training for the company staff, guiding the staff to master customer acquisition and retention skills.

Another skill that a customer engagement manager needs to possess in order to perform well in terms of their responsibilities is analyzing skills. This line in the resume of a customer engagement manager indicated how important the analytical skill is, “customer engagement managers are responsible for collecting, analyzing and interpreting complicated data to understand the potential geographic areas, demographic groups, and figure out the most effective and practical customer engagement strategy.” 

The effective and efficient communication skill is also a must if you wish to pursue the customer engagement manager career. As indicated clearly in a customer engagement manager resume, this is how these skills are necessary for customer engagement managers to perform well, “customer engagement managers will coordinate with their colleagues and customers closely on a regular basis, that’s why they need to demonstrate the ability to communicate effectively. The following excerpt taken from another resume pointed out how vital it is to perform the competency in communicating in their regular roles and responsibilities, “managed all elements of the project including technology integration, communications, and vendor SLA development.”

Also, if you want to become a customer engagement manager in the future, you also need to perform well in terms of “leadership skills”. It’s no wonder why managers need the leadership knowledge and skillsets in order to function well in managing and leading a group of senior customer engagement executives or specialists. The responsibility of a customer engagement manager involving this line of skills are pointed out in this excerpt: “customer engagement managers need to demonstrate their capability of assessing and evaluating how their staff are operating and are responsible for analyzing data to formulate great customer engagement strategies that help to accomplish the business objectives”.

Education & Qualifications

Beside most vital and necessary skills and personality traits, what are the qualifications or education programs that a customer engagement manager should take to ground a valid position in this career? According to a study, 47.1% of customer engagement managers received a bachelor’s degree while 27.9% obtained their master’s ones. As a matter of fact, after a while working in the field, you may also find a number of people that achieved success in this career with only high school degrees. But the promotion and salary all depend on your competency and effort. Of course, the customer engagement managers who went onto college stand a higher chance of promotion while they acquired a more valid base of knowledge on certain programs such as business or marketing.

Bottom lines

In general, customer engagement managers actually are and tend to become an extremely desirable career in the coming years, because it meets the urgent needs of every industry, including hot industries like technology or retail industries. In addition, with an average salary of $ 115,582 per year, this is considered to be one of the highest salaries in the customer service field.