Customer Success Manager: North Africa (French & Arabic)

As a Customer Success Manager for Africa at Backbase, you will be at the forefront of driving customer satisfaction and success across French and Arabic-speaking countries in Africa. Ideally based in North Africa or the Middle East, you will be responsible for ensuring that our customers derive maximum value from Backbase’s Engagement Banking Platform. This role involves frequent travel across the region and requires a strong ability to build and maintain relationships with key stakeholders at all levels, from C-suite decision-makers to programme leaders.

Your mission is to foster product adoption and license consumption, enhance customer satisfaction, and contribute to Net ARR Growth by ensuring that our customers successfully leverage Backbase's solutions to achieve their business goals.

This role offers a unique opportunity to make a significant impact on Backbase’s customer success in Africa, helping our customers achieve their strategic goals while driving growth and adoption of our engagement banking platform and other solutions.

Success is defined as accountability for delivering programs, accountability for driving the ROI for customer’s investment in Backbase platform and services, accountability for up-and cross sell (Product License ARR) and accountability for an outstanding Net Promoter Score (NPS).

What you'll do

Customer Relationship Management:

- Develop and nurture strong, long-lasting relationships with key customers across Africa.

- Regularly engage with senior stakeholders to understand their evolving needs and expectations throughout the software development lifecycle, positioning yourself as a trusted advisor and valuable resource.

- Facilitate complex discussions that involve multiple stakeholders, helping to align their goals with Backbase's solutions and unblocking any adoption and license consumption challenges.

Value Maximization:

- Collaborate with customers to identify opportunities to maximize the value they derive from Backbase products.

- Work with Backbase Customer Advisory to localize business cases.

- Provide strategic guidance and best practices to ensure business cases align to the region and bank specific goals, ensuring customers are fully utilizing the range of product capabilities available to them.

- Proactively identify and address potential challenges, working towards solutions that align with the customer’s business objectives.

- Develop joint success plans with senior stakeholders, with clear objectives that are aligned with their strategic goals.

- Actively work with the customer on roadmap planning to track and ensure the realization of the business case throughout the programme lifecycle.

Advocacy Building:

- Identify and cultivate customer advocates who are willing to share their success stories and experiences with Backbase solutions.

- Collaborate with marketing teams to create case studies, testimonials, and other materials that showcase customer success.

Feedback Collection and Product Improvement:

- Gather and analyze product utilization, and end user feedback on product experiences, providing actionable insights to R&D and steward the

- Request for Feature (RFF) process as a joint responsibility with the Services team.

- Act as a bridge between customers and Backbase’s product development organization. Work with the Backbase UX Research team, ensuring that customer needs and suggestions are considered in future product enhancements.

Account Management:

- Proactively manage renewals by aligning customer success plans and business cases with value realization, ensuring continued customer satisfaction and retention.

- In collaboration with Sales, identify opportunities for account growth by understanding the banks’ business dynamics and leveraging them to expand ARR.

- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Technology, Business, or a related field.

- Experience: 8+ years of experience in a customer-facing role, including consulting, customer support, or account management in Africa, with a focus on customer success in the technology or software industry.

- Technical Acumen: Previous experience in roles requiring technical understanding, particularly in customer success management within a software company.

- Language Proficiency: Fluent in both French and Arabic, with strong written and verbal communication skills. Proficiency in English is also required.

- Customer-Centric Mindset: Passionate about delivering success for customers, with a deep commitment to understanding customer needs and delivering solutions that exceed their expectations.

- Results-Driven: Strong focus on customer satisfaction, with the ability to analyze data and provide actionable insights and maintain dashboards that drive product adoption and customer success.

- Relationship Builder: Exceptional communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to challenge, negotiate, influence, and persuade stakeholders.

- Autonomous and Cross-Functional: Ability to work independently, take ownership of customer success initiatives, and drive results, while collaborating across teams with Sales, R&D and Services colleagues, as well as Backbase’s partner network.

- Organizational Skills: Capable of prioritizing tasks, multitasking, and demonstrating adaptability in a dynamic environment.

- Commercial and Functional Acumen: Understand the unique cultural and digital trends in the customer’s market and speak to business drivers, with a strong focus on maximizing value for customers. Experience in banking or other Financial Services is a plus.

- Frequent Traveler: Willingness to travel frequently across Francophone and Arabic Africa to engage with banks and ensure their success with Backbase.