Best Resources for Customer Engagement Managers

Whether you’re looking to deepen your expertise, stay updated with industry trends, or find practical tools to enhance your workflow, the right resources are essential for continuous growth and success.

This guide will introduce you to the best resources available for customer engagement managers, providing you with a curated selection of valuable materials to enhance your skills and knowledge.

What is a customer engagement manager?

A customer engagement manager is a professional who acts as the main point of contact between a company and its clients. They oversee projects, ensure client satisfaction, and work to build strong, lasting relationships.

What does a customer engagement manager do?

The specific duties of a customer engagement manager may vary depending on the industry and company. Still, their core focus is on ensuring client satisfaction and fostering strong, long-term relationships.

Customer engagement manager’s main responsibilities

Customer engagement managers are the driving force behind successful client relationships. They ensure clients derive maximum value from products/services, leading to long-term partnerships and growth.

Their key responsibilities include:

Relationship Building: Foster trust and rapport with key client stakeholders, becoming their trusted advisor and advocate.
Onboarding and Implementation: Guide clients through seamless onboarding, develop personalized implementation plans, and ensure successful product adoption.
Customer Advocacy: Proactively address client concerns, gather feedback, and advocate for their needs within the company.
Value Demonstration: Showcase product value through data-driven insights, demonstrating ROI and business impact.
Retention and Growth: Drive customer retention, secure renewals, and identify opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.
Data Analysis: Leverage analytics to track product usage, identify trends, and optimize customer engagement.
Collaboration: Partner with cross-functional teams to deliver a unified and exceptional customer experience.
Communication: Maintain clear and proactive communication with clients, ensuring alignment and addressing any issues promptly.

Here are some valuable resources to help customer engagement managers excel in their roles

Best books for customer engagement managers

Customer engagement managers need a well-rounded skill set that spans from understanding customer psychology to mastering project management methodologies. To help you excel in your role, here are some must-read books that provide valuable insights into customer success, loyalty, and retention:

Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue by Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy: This comprehensive guide provides a deep dive into the world of customer success, outlining the essential strategies, metrics, and frameworks for building a successful program. It’s a must-read for anyone serious about understanding the field.
The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi: This book challenges the conventional wisdom that exceeding customer expectations is the key to loyalty. Instead, it argues for creating an “effortless experience” that reduces customer effort and increases satisfaction.
Driving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value is Revolutionizing Corporate Performance by Roland T. Rust, Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Katherine N. Lemon: This book focuses on the concept of customer equity—the total combined customer lifetime values of all of a company’s customers. It provides a framework for measuring and managing customer equity to drive long-term growth.
Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine by Jeanne Bliss: This book offers a roadmap for building a customer-centric culture and driving growth through customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’s packed with practical advice and case studies from leading companies.
Subscription Marketing: Strategies for Nurturing Customers in a World of Churn by Anne Janzer: This book is a comprehensive guide to subscription marketing, covering everything from acquisition to retention. It offers insights into how to build a sustainable subscription business and keep customers engaged over time.

Best webinars for customer engagement managers

Staying updated on the latest trends and best practices is crucial for customer engagement managers. These platforms and events offer valuable webinars that cover a wide range of topics, from customer success strategies to product adoption tactics:

Userpilot Events: Keep an eye on our events page for our own webinars, with talks often covering topics like in-app experiences, onboarding, and product adoption strategies.
BrightTALK: This platform hosts a wide range of webinars from various industries, including many focused on customer success, engagement, and marketing.
Gainsight Pulse: Their annual conference often features webinars and virtual sessions on customer success and engagement best practices. Check their website and social media for upcoming events and recordings.
ChurnZero: Their BIG RYG (Reduce, Grow, Yield) events usually include webinars focused on churn reduction and customer expansion strategies.

Best blogs for customer engagement managers

Enhance your understanding of customer engagement, success, and onboarding with these informative blogs:

Userpilot Blog: This blog is a fantastic resource for customer engagement managers, offering in-depth articles, guides, and case studies on user onboarding, product adoption, and customer retention.
The Help Scout Blog: This blog provides valuable insights on customer service, support, and engagement, with a focus on building strong customer relationships.
The HubSpot Blog: This blog covers a wide range of marketing and customer engagement topics, including inbound marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing.
Customer Engagement Blogs – Feedly: This Feedly collection aggregates articles from various blogs on customer engagement, making it easy to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and insights.

Best podcasts for customer engagement managers

Here are some of the most popular and updated podcasts for customer engagement managers, based on reviews, ratings, streams, and recent episode releases:

The Jasons Take On: Hosted by seasoned customer success veterans Jason Noble (ChurnZero CEO) and Jason Smith (Founder of SaaStr), this podcast provides a deep dive into customer success strategies, SaaS growth tactics, and the evolving landscape of the industry. Their combined experience delivers actionable insights and thought-provoking discussions, making it a valuable resource for customer engagement managers.
Gain Grow Retain: Led by Jeff Breunsbach (President of Customer Imperative), this podcast explores the full customer lifecycle, offering practical advice for improving customer experience and driving retention. With a diverse range of guest experts, the podcast shares real-world case studies and actionable tips for building customer-centric cultures.
The Customer Engagement Lab: Hosted by customer service expert Adam Toporek, this podcast dives into the nuances of customer engagement. It uncovers the latest trends and best practices for creating meaningful connections and long-term relationships with customers, blending practical advice with research-backed insights.
Client Success Podcast: Featuring interviews with customer success leaders and practitioners, this podcast, hosted by Jay Nathan (Founder of Customer Imperative), showcases real-world examples of customer success strategies in action. It offers inspiration, motivation, and networking opportunities for customer engagement managers.
SaaS Breakthrough: Hosted by SaaS Academy founder Aaron Krall, this podcast addresses the unique challenges and opportunities faced by SaaS businesses. It explores various aspects of SaaS growth, including marketing, sales, product development, and customer success, offering a broad perspective and practical tips for scaling your business.

Best certifications for customer engagement managers

Based on discussions and recommendations we gather from professionals, here are some of the most widely recognized and valuable certifications for customer engagement managers:

Project Management Professional (PMP): The gold standard in project management, the PMP demonstrates your ability to lead and direct projects of any size, making it a highly valuable asset for customer engagement managers who often juggle multiple client projects.
ITIL Foundation: If you work in a tech-focused environment, this certification demonstrates your understanding of IT service management best practices, which can be beneficial for managing client expectations and ensuring smooth project delivery.
Change Management Certifications: (Prosci, APMG, etc.) If change management is a significant aspect of your role, these certifications can be valuable.
Strategies to Effective Customer Engagement by the Imperial College Business School: The course is designed for business professionals interested in learning about the latest tools and cutting-edge knowledge of customer engagement. Some of the topics covered in the course include customer relationship marketing, customer engagement strategies, marketing channels management, strategic marketing communications, and brand management.

Best tools for customer engagement managers

Whether you’re looking to analyze user behavior, create personalized onboarding experiences, or manage customer support interactions, there’s a tool out there that can help. Let’s explore some of the top solutions that can empower customer engagement managers to excel in their roles:

Userpilot – Best for no-code in-app experiences & analytics: It empowers customer engagement managers to create personalized onboarding flows, feature walkthroughs, and surveys without coding. It also comes with powerful analytics that provide data-driven insights to optimize user engagement.
Appcues – Best for user-friendly in-app guidance & onboarding: With its intuitive interface and templates, Appcues enables customer engagement managers to craft visually appealing in-app tours, tooltips, and surveys, streamlining onboarding and driving feature adoption.
Pendo – Best for comprehensive product experience & analytics: Pendo offers customer engagement managers a robust feedback loop, and powerful analytics tools to make data-driven decisions for optimizing the user experience.
Amplitude – Best for advanced product analytics & user behavior tracking: It equips customer engagement managers with the ability to track user journeys, analyze funnels, and measure the impact of product changes.
Heap: Best for automatic capture & analysis of every user interaction: It provides customer engagement managers with a complete picture of user behavior, allowing for retroactive analysis and identification of friction points.
Zendesk – Best for centralized customer service & support: It streamlines customer support operations for customer engagement managers, allowing them to efficiently resolve issues, empower users with self-service resources, and analyze support trends for product improvement insights.
Custify – Best for B2B SaaS customer success management: It enables customer engagement managers to proactively monitor customer health, identify at-risk customers, deliver personalized engagement, and uncover upsell/cross-sell opportunities, ultimately reducing churn and maximizing customer lifetime value.

Conclusion

Professional growth is a continuous journey, and investing in your development is key to staying competitive in the field.

We hope this guide has equipped you with the tools and knowledge needed to excel in your role.

Looking into tools for customer engagement managers? Userpilot is an all-in-one product platform with engagement features and powerful analytics capabilities. Book a demo to see it in action!

Best Resources for Customer Engagement Managers

What is a customer engagement manager?

What does a customer engagement manager do?

Customer engagement manager’s main responsibilities