Customer Experience Lead

About Pressbooks:

We are a small team working together to build and share software that supports new models for book publishing with an emphasis on supporting open educational resources (aka free digital textbooks) and other types of educational innovation powered by digital content. We are passionate about open source, open content, open knowledge, and the intersection of books and the web.

We’re a self-sustaining open source / SaaS business with a growing list of happy clients in Canada, the United States, and beyond. Most of our clients are universities and other educational institutions that use Pressbooks to power their publishing and open/free digital textbook creation programs. We care deeply about customer success and the educational communities that rely on our products.

We are a fully remote company. Our team is welcoming, compassionate, and committed to maintaining a safe and encouraging environment for people of all racial backgrounds and gender identities. Our work hours, vacation time, and sick or care leave policies are designed to support healthy engagement with work and space for a satisfying life outside of it.

About the Role:

Pressbooks is in a unique market position. We are considered essential infrastructure within the open education community, a small but growing niche within higher education, and most of our clients adore us. Because our versatile publishing platform can be invaluable to many parts of organizations that center on learning, knowledge creation and sharing, we’re excited about opportunities to grow our footprint within and beyond our established base.

The Pressbooks Customer Success Lead works alongside network and institutional managers to help them achieve their goals with Pressbooks, and turns that on-the-ground experience into evidence the team can act on. That evidence runs in both directions: it shapes what we build, and it shapes how Sales and Marketing position and price what we have already built. The role is also custodian of the process by which we decide what to build next: convening the quarterly prioritization session, keeping the record of what was decided, and reporting when work drifts from what was agreed.

The CX Lead is a member of Pressbooks’ customer-facing team and reports directly to the VP Strategic Engagement & Growth. This is a highly collaborative function that engages regularly with customers and works closely with the Marketing, Sales, Product and Support functions.

The CX Lead is responsible, in collaboration with the broader team, for developing, implementing, and measuring the effectiveness of strategies related to customer success-focused KPIs.

Requirements

About You:

You love building relationships with clients and working proactively to help them apply best practices and achieve success. You thrive working across functions (account management, product, support, marketing, customer success, etc.) to improve the customer experience

You are adept at listening to clients, gathering data about their needs and goals, and then identifying and prioritizing activities to positively impact customer happiness, growth, and retention. You are comfortable running a study end to end, from framing the question through to reporting what the findings mean commercially, and you can tell the difference between what one client said and what a pattern across the base is telling you.

You write clearly and you facilitate well. You can make the client case in a room where product strategy and technical trade-offs are weighing other priorities, and you make it with evidence.

You have excellent organizational and people skills. You are determined and self-motivated. You approach problem-solving with curiosity, creativity, and an openness to experimentation. You reliably deliver high-quality work. You get excited about using data to figure out how to improve and work smarter. You know how to work productively in a small, collaborative team. You are skilled at managing your time and energy in a largely autonomous remote work environment.

Responsibilities:

• Care about customers, the relationships we build with them, and the goals, trends and challenges they care about, and what “success” with Pressbooks means for them.
• Build and grow client publishing programs with network managers: engaging with authors, promoting publishing on campus, designing program structure, and setting goals that align what the client is trying to achieve with what Pressbooks does well.
• Take handoff from Sales once a client is onboarded and carry the relationship forward, conducting client check-ins and flagging accounts that cross intervention thresholds to Sales and Support.
• Deliver programs that increase effective use of Pressbooks through training, webinars, workshops, pilots and communities of practice, and create the video tutorials, demos and presentations that support them.
• Identify accounts ready for more, whether additional buy-ins on a shared network, add-ons, or a larger tier, and pass those signals to Sales with the evidence behind them.
• Research why institutions buy, stay and leave: how they fund open publishing, who decides, how procurement works, what we are compared against, and where our value proposition holds. Track the sector, including competitors, funding shifts and policy changes relevant to open education and edtech.
• Run the annual CSAT survey end to end, including design, distribution, analysis and reporting, and use the results to help the team understand our customers and how they are using our solutions. This is how we measure Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Supply the evidence behind pricing and packaging, including willingness to pay by segment, and develop and test the value proposition with the Sales Lead and Marketing Lead.
• Convene the quarterly prioritization session with the UX/UI Designer and the product owners, write up what was agreed including any disagreement and the reasoning on each side, keep the record of decisions taken, and report early when work drifts from what was decided.
• Follow up twice yearly on decisions already taken: what we expected the work to achieve, what actually happened, what has been adopted, and what we would decide differently.
• Brief Sales and Marketing on what has shipped and what it means commercially, and contribute the client-facing side of launches alongside Marketing, which owns positioning and messaging.
• Advocate for clients on an Internal Committee, and feed Sales, Marketing and Support what client work surfaces so that onboarding, messaging and documentation reflect where clients actually struggle.
• Be a resident expert on what customers are doing and what works: noteworthy projects and milestones, effective practices, innovations, etc.
• Develop customer champions and opportunities to showcase client successes through webinars, industry conferences, blogs and virtual communities, in collaboration with Marketing.

Candidate Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Education, Technology, Communications, or a related field
• 5+ years of proven experience in customer success, account management, program or instructional support, institutional publishing, or a similar client-facing role in the technology or education sector
• Experience designing, running and reporting on research with clients or users, whether surveys, interviews, or both
• Excellent written communication, including the ability to summarize a decision and the reasoning behind it so that someone who was not in the room can follow it
• Facilitation skills, including the ability to run a working session where capable people disagree and to record that disagreement fairly
• Excellent interpersonal, presentation, and collaboration skills
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to manage multiple priorities and tasks with great attention to detail
• A passion for education and the intersection of technology, learning, and knowledge-sharing
• Strong organizational and project management skills with the ability to handle multiple projects simultaneously and collaborate cross-functionally with other teams
• Analytical skills and experience using data to set priorities and inform decisions and strategy
• Proficiency with Google Workspace applications (Docs, Sheets, Slides, email, calendar, etc.)

Nice to Have:

• Prior experience with Pressbooks and/or other digital publishing platforms
• Prior experience with Learning Management Systems
• Prior experience in the domains for which institutional clients use Pressbooks: academic publishing, instructional design, learning technology, open education, etc.
• Familiarity with how institutions fund and procure software, particularly in higher education
• Experience contributing pricing, packaging or willingness-to-pay evidence
• Experience with customer journey mapping
• Familiarity with survey research design, execution, and analysis at scale
• Familiarity with Hubspot, Zendesk, and/or CRM and/or customer support systems

Benefits

What We Offer:

• 4-day work week, with Fridays off
• 4 weeks of vacation and time off during the December holidays
• Extended health care, including dental and vision
• 24/7 telehealth services
• Employee assistance program (legal, financial and career)
• Generous benefits package that includes:

○ tech allowance,

○ wellness allowance,

○ book allowance,

○ internet allowance,

○ home office allowance

○ group RRSP

○ memberships to discount platforms.

What to expect once you apply:

After initial screening for qualifications, you will be invited to join a 30-minute intro call with our recruitment team, during which we will walk you through the team’s mission, the role, and the interview process.

Following the intro call, we will invite selected candidates to advance to a one-hour interview with the hiring manager. Finalists will be invited to an additional 1-hour interview with members of your future team.

Job Type: Full-time

Location: Canada-wide remote

Travel: Periodic, 1 to 4 times per year, to attend conferences, meet with clients, and join meetings and work sessions with all or part of the Pressbooks team