Client Success Manager

Bernardhq; New York (NY); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Bernardhq is seeking a proactive Client Success professional to be the first dedicated CS hire. You will own the entire post-sale relationship, including onboarding, activation, support, expansion, and retention, while building a scalable function from zero.

Your customers are appliance repair company owners and dispatchers. You will earn their trust, tailor the product to their workflow, and prove ROI with real numbers, becoming the single point of accountability for their success.

Qualifications

• End-to-end onboarding experience for customers.
• Proactive account health checks and retention focus.
• Ability to build and document kill-and-win playbooks.
• Bridge between customer needs and product/engineering.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end onboarding from contract to activation.
• Monitor account health and proactively manage at-risk accounts.
• Create onboarding and support playbooks from scratch.
• Surface product gaps and feedback to eng/PM teams.
• Identify expansion opportunities and drive retention metrics.
• Collaborate directly with CEO, CTO, and engineering.

Skills

Onboarding

Account management

Customer success

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

HubSpot

Support platforms

Automation tools

Job description

About Bernard

Half of all appliance repair visits fail on the first trip. Wrong part. Wrong diagnosis. The homeowner waits another week. The company eats another truck roll. Multiply that across millions of service calls a year and you're looking at a broken layer of American infrastructure that nobody's talking about.

Bernard fixes this at the point of first contact. Our AI answers the call, runs the diagnostic, predicts the right parts against live inventory, and sends the technician out with a game plan. We don't just book the job. We solve it before the truck rolls. The result: first-visit fix rates go from 50% to 80%.

We're live with enterprise customers, growing fast, and building the operating system for field service from our office in NYC. Every hire here touches the product, the customer, and the trajectory of the company.

The Role

You are the first dedicated Client Success hire at Bernard. You own the entire post-sale customer relationship: onboarding, activation, support, expansion, and retention. You build this function from zero.

Your customers are appliance repair company owners and dispatchers. They run 15–300 trucks, take 50+ calls a day, and have never had the opportunity to truly experience great technology. They are busy, direct, and skeptical. You need to earn their trust, understand their operation, and make their lives tangibly better.

This is not passive account management. You are changing how these businesses operate. You configure the product to fit their workflow, hold their hand through the transition, and prove ROI with real numbers. When something breaks, you're the first call. When something works, you're the one who makes sure they know it.

What You'll Own

• End-to-end onboarding. From signed contract through full deployment and activation. No handholding from the founders.

• Account health. Proactive check-ins, usage monitoring, escalation handling. You know which accounts are thriving and which are at risk before anyone tells you.

• Playbook creation. Build the onboarding, training, and support processes from scratch. Document everything. Make it repeatable.

• Voice of the customer. Surface product gaps, feature requests, and friction to the engineering and product team. You are the bridge between what customers need and what we build.

• Net revenue retention. Identify expansion opportunities. Catch churn signals early. Hit your number.

• Cross-functional execution. Work directly with the CEO, CTO, and engineering team to resolve issues and ship improvements. No layers between you and the people who can fix things.

You Should Apply If

• You've onboarded customers at a company where the playbook didn't exist yet and you had to build it.

• You've managed a book of business where retention and expansion were your responsibility, not just CSAT scores.

• You're the person who builds the spreadsheet, writes the SOP, and follows up without being asked.

• You can get on the phone with a 60-year-old appliance repair shop owner in Tampa and a 28-year-old software engineer in the same afternoon and be credible with both.

• You're comfortable being the single point of accountability for a customer's success.

• You want to build a function, lead a team, and grow into a leadership role at a company that rewards ownership.

• You're energized by speed, not stressed by it.

Preferred

• Experience in a startup or early-stage company where you wore multiple hats and were customer-facing.

• Familiarity with trades, field service, home services, or blue-collar industries.

• Experience with HubSpot, support platforms, or automation tools.

• You've worked with or sold to small business owners before.

How We Work

We are a small team. Everyone owns their domain end to end. There is no middle management, no committees, and no approval chains. If something needs to happen, you make it happen. A significant portion of this role is on the phone with customers. You should be someone who picks up the phone first and sends the email second.

We work in person at Chelsea Piers in New York City. We move fast, give direct feedback, and hold each other to a high bar. The pace is startup pace: if that energizes you, you'll love it here.