Customer Success Strategy and Operations Manager

Job Description

Customer Success Strategy & Operations Manager

The Customer Success Strategy & Automation Team at Zendesk accelerates customer value, adoption, and retention by enabling the Customer Success organization to operate with consistency at global scale. We do this through tooling, automation, processes and enablement—all in service of our goal of delivering best-in-class customer experience.
 

We’re looking for a Customer Success Strategy and Operations Manager to join our Strategy & Operations team and to be based in Portugal. This role will lead the design, implementation, and optimization of scalable processes that drive operational consistency, proactive customer engagement, and improved retention — directly contributing to Zendesk’s mission to drive best-in-class GRR. You’ll collaborate across CS, CX, SalesOps, Product, and Enablement to ensure our teams have clear, measurable, and automated ways to deliver value throughout the customer lifecycle.

In your role you will: 

• Set the strategy for how we use Gainsight, document requirements, and work with our IT admins to execute on them 

• Play a key role in designing and building workflows to allow our CS Team to support our customers at scale 

• Identify areas for improvement in our workflow and design solutions that drive efficiency for our CSMs and CS Leaders

• Design and implement automated workflows within Gainsight and Gong to support customer success initiatives.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align system processes with business objectives

• Create and maintain dashboards and reports that provide actionable insights into customer behavior, CSM skills, and areas of opportunity. 

• Analyze data trends to identify opportunities for improving customer retention and satisfaction

• Build strong partnerships with CS Leadership to ensure alignment across initiatives

• Partner closely with Enablement to identify areas of opportunity for the CS Team and influence the roadmap

• Work with Enablement to develop training materials and live sessions for Customer Success Teams on effectively using Gainsight, Gong, and other key tools and processes

• Provide ongoing support to users, addressing questions and ensuring adherence to best practices

To succeed in this role you must be:

• Fluent in English (verbal and written)

• Have 5+ years of experience in Customer Success Strategy, Customer Success Operations, Revenue Operations, Sales Operations, or Business Process Optimization

• Deep understanding of Customer Success motions across lifecycle stages

• Experience designing, implementing, and improving business processes at scale

• Strong collaboration and communication skills; comfort driving alignment across cross-functional teams

• Familiarity with Gainsight, Gong, Salesforce, and process visualization tools (Lucidchart, Miro, etc.)

• Data-driven mindset — comfortable analyzing process adoption and impact metrics

• Bonus: Experience in a SaaS or high-growth environment 

This is a high-impact role at the intersection of technology and customer value. You’ll directly enable Zendesk’s Customer Success team to engage smarter, faster, and more proactively — helping us retain and grow our customer base in 2025 and beyond.

Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

Zendesk is an equal