Technical Customer Success Manager

Cisco; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 110,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco in Houston seeks a Technical Customer Success & Risk Management professional to drive adoption of Cisco technologies, mitigate renewal risk, and identify expansion opportunities. You’ll lead cross‑functional efforts with Sales, Renewal, and Product teams to maximize customer value and retention.

Responsibilities include orchestrating multi‑stream adoption programs, applying AI/automation insights, and guiding customers through transformative journeys that align technology with evolving

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 8+ years IT or customer success experience.
• Advanced expertise in renewals risk management and adoption metrics.
• Experience driving multi-team programs and executive stakeholders.
• Strong analytical and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Manage a portfolio of complex strategic accounts and multi-stakeholder teams.
• Lead adoption initiatives using AI-tools to predict challenges and drive value realization.
• Coordinate cross-functional teams to enable renewals and expansion.
• Conduct alignment workshops and executive updates to guide adoption roadmaps.
• Act as a liaison across product and engineering for customer-driven feedback.

Skills

Technical leadership

Customer success

Risk management

AI/ML awareness

Renewals coordination

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

PhD

CCNP or equivalent certification

Tools

Salesforce

BI tools

Job description

The TECHNICAL 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.

What You'll Do:

• 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

Minimum Qualifications

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