Customer Success Manager

About the Customer Success Manager Role at Kong

As a Customer Success Manager at Kong, you will serve as a dedicated champion for our customers, acting as the primary post-sales point of contact for all technical, product, and support inquiries. This role involves establishing and implementing processes and projects to ensure successful adoption of Kong products. You will engage with various stakeholders, from developers to executives, understanding their business, operational, and technical needs to help them maximize value from Kong's offerings.

What You Will Do

• Engage with customers primarily through inbound requests, ensuring timely and effective resolution.
• Support the onboarding of new customers by validating their needs, identifying key project timelines, potential challenges, and risk factors.
• Drive the adoption and implementation of Kong product features by leading hands-on product demonstrations and technical workshop sessions.
• Conduct periodic reviews of Kong implementations through health checks to ensure optimal performance and usage.
• Understand, advocate for, and thoroughly document each customer's unique use case, architecture, and roadmap.
• Collaborate with customers to explore new use cases and expand their utilization of Kong's API platform.
• Build active and meaningful relationships, emerging as a trusted technical advisor and partner to our customers.
• Participate in renewal or expansion discussions, providing crucial technical input to Sales or Renewal teams.
• Effectively manage the tracking and resolution of customer escalations related to products and services.
• Manage customer accounts using Kong’s established customer maturity model framework.
• Perform any additional tasks required by management to support customer success initiatives.

What You'll Bring

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to concisely articulate complex technical issues and solutions to diverse audiences.
• Practical working knowledge of APIs and microservices architectures is essential.
• Previous experience with Kubernetes and leading Cloud technologies (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Proven ability to tell compelling stories with data, articulating the business value realized through Kong products.
• Strong collaboration and teamwork skills, enabling effective work with cross-functional teams (sales, product, engineering, marketing, support, etc.) to represent the voice of the customer.
• A strong desire to tackle challenging technical problems and a demonstrated ability to do so with minimal direct daily supervision.
• Experience managing multiple projects concurrently, maintaining a keen attention to detail and delivering results across various initiatives, including driving expansion, customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention.

About Kong

Kong Inc. is a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by both Fortune 500 companies and startups, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, empowers organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.

Key skills/competency

• Customer Success Management
• API Management
• Microservices Architecture
• Kubernetes Expertise
• Cloud Platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Technical Support
• Client Relationship Building
• Product Adoption Strategies
• Escalation Management
• Data-driven Storytelling