Customer service: master the English of your profession!

If it wasn’t already obvious, CSM roles rely on excellent communication, and what’s essential to good communication? Vocabulary! Not only is a Customer Success Manager a customer-facing role, it’s also a technical role that requires a solid foundation in business and all the right terms and expressions to ensure you can keep on top of customer-related matters. Let’s take a look at a short selection of business terms that any CSM worth their salt must know and be able to use:

• Customer churn / attrition / turnover = the loss of a customer account
• Downsell = offering a more affordable product to a customer to ensure a sale
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) = a metric for measuring your company’s growth
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) = a way of measuring the likelihood your customers will remain loyal (usually acquired through surveys)
• Onboarding = introducing a new consumer to your company
• Goals = working with customers is objective-driven work and your goal as CSM should be ensuring customer success
• Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) = defining who you are selling your product/service to
• Customer journey = the experience of your customers from the moment they engage with your product/service
• B2B = Business-to-business products, sales and services
• B2C = Business-to-consumer products, sales and services
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) = measurable indicators for tracking the success of customer engagement, satisfaction, product usage, etc.
• Lifecycle stages = the consumer lifecycle from hearing about your company to becoming a loyal customer
• Year over year (YoY) = comparing results from one year to the next is often the most useful way to understand your company’s performance
• Quarterly Business Review (QBR) = a once-per-quarter exchange with your customer used in some circumstances to assess goals
• Customer satisfaction = measuring how satisfied your customers are with your offering
• Value proposition = showing off and reminding your customers about the value of your product/service
• Upselling = the opposite of downselling, persuading a customer to opt for a more expensive product/service
• X-selling = when you sell a different product/service to an existing customer

Working in a role based around ensuring customer happiness and solving problems requires being at ease with communication and maintaining a happy disposition. One way we can make our customers happy is by being happy ourselves.

Let’s look at a few essential phrases that take an everyday interaction and make it friendlier:

• “I’d be happy to help!”
• “As much as I'd love to help you with that, unfortunately…”
• “That’s a great question.”
• “Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention...”
• “I completely understand why you would expect that.”

If your objective is to improve your vocabulary and expressions for the CSM sector, the good news is that we’ve got the tools to help you do just that. On GlobalExam, we’ve dedicated one of our learning modules to the CSM sector, with beginner, intermediate and advanced vocabulary and grammar divided up over more than 30 situations to prepare you for working in an English-speaking CSM role. Let’s take a look at the type of exercises you can practice with on our platform.

Learning situations on GlobalExam start by introducing you to the topic that will be tackled in that particular set of resources. This example situation looks at finding solutions for problems, which is a typical CSM task.

You begin the situation by watching the video explaining the objectives of the lesson. This is a simple way of familiarizing yourself with English comprehension, and there is also a transcript to help out if you get stuck.

Each situation is composed of different parts, and this one begins with an example text: an email from one colleague to another sharing some bad news. Each text will introduce you to new vocabulary and expressions that will be tested with exercises. Here you can see two examples highlighted in orange. Below is a full list of the terms tested in this text:

• to bear bad news - to share bad news
• to assess - to evaluate
• an invoice - a document that proves that you paid something
• to have a grasp of something - to have a clear understanding of something
• a dashboard - an interface where you have many options
• updates - new information
• to comply with something - to be adequate

Here is an example exercise based on the previous text. Typical exercises will ask you to complete a multiple-choice question, fill in the gaps, or reorder words in a sentence. This exercise requires you to have on boarded a key term from the text, “invoice”.

Every exercise is immediately corrected and the answers come with an explanation, so you’ll be able to understand where you’ve gone wrong if you choose the wrong response.

So far, it is clear that CSMs are a bridge between clients, customer support and salespeople because they manage cross-sells, upsells and renewals. When you check most of the world’s leading brands’ CSMs job requirements, you notice that the ideal candidate must have excellent English written and verbal communication skills at all levels in order to manage clients from all over the world.

Being able to build strategic relationships with clients requires outstanding oral, written and presentation skills. In order to become the customers’ voice a CSM must speak their lingua franca, which is English. Besides, tasks like resolving after sales queries will imply writing emails and talking on the phone to ensure the customers understand all the aftersales procedures.

If you know you are a CSM innate, don’t let language be a barrier! Improve your English skills with GlobalExam! Imagine being able to live a typical day in a CSM’s life by doing different tasks such as explaining launch process to new customers, running product training sessions, creating and distributing educational materials and videos to help customers get more value from the product, identify superfans for customer success stories or troubleshooting different issues… all that in fluent English!

Boost your Professional English with our new product: GlobalExam Business!

Do you consider your English level to be insufficient to use it in a daily working environment?

We have designed our Business program based on five essential principles to succeed in e-learning:

• Clear objectives
• Courses adapted to the learners’ needs
• Real-life situations that correspond to real corporate life
• Videocoaching and, last but not least:

Certified competences that prove your language level.

There are a huge number of methods for learning English nowadays, but as technology becomes more sophisticated and we get used to distance learning, e-learning platforms are becoming a more appealing option for language learning. Let’s consider some of the advantages of learning English online:

Pedagogical advantages

• Learn on a sophisticated platform with excellent user experience
• Learning adapted to three levels: beginner; intermediate; and advanced
• Learn at your own pace
• Complement your independent learning with guided lessons

Methodological advantages

• Orientate your learning around the topics you need to move forward
• Use a sophisticated combined learning method where vocabulary, grammar and context come together
• Focus on skills that can be directly applied to real-life situations

Technological advantages

• A reliable platform with excellent live connectivity
• Learning that uses multiple media (audio, video, text, live)
• Complete exercises and get instant feedback
• Follow your learning and target your weaknesses

If you’ve decided that online learning could be for you, here are some ideas of ways to go about it:

• Download a language app
• Download an online grammar aid
• Subscribe to an e-learning platform
• Find a personal tutor
• Follow English news and media.

However you choose to improve your English, you’re going to make some progress. But one of the fastest and most effective ways you can improve your English communication skills is by interacting with other English speakers.

In addition to all the vocabulary and grammar tools you can learn with on GlobalExam, we also offer the opportunity to participate in online classes. There’s no better way to put your knowledge to the test than by applying it to real conversations with other learned and trained teachers.

We offer two types of class: a half-an-hour individual lesson; or a one-hour group lesson with up to six other students. All our online lessons are guided by a certified native English teacher and each lesson can be tailored to meet your needs.

Find out more and learn top 10 tips to stay motivated when learning English online.

• Skill boost: these are the competences shared by different professions: meetings, answering the telephone, or project management.
• Industry boost: these skills are focused on the language and challenges of diverse types of industry: tourism, banking, energy.
• Job boost: these are career-oriented skills, each profession has its specific language, so it is essential to learn the right vocabulary.

English for CSM is one of 7 Business online courses dedicated to job skills, here is the list of the others you can find:

• English marketing course with GlobalExam
• English course for communication
• English course for Human resources
• Business course for sales
• English for purchasing
• English course for management

And, how about creating your CV in English? We’re also going to give you a hand with that and on many other topics:

• How to negotiate in English?
• How to write an email in English?
• Project management in English
• Managing interculturality in English
• Recruitment process in English
• How to answer the phone in English?
• Greeting a business client in English
• Conducting a meeting
• Mastering English for travelling on business

Don’t hesitate, register now to our program. There are three levels: beginner, intermediate or expert. Find out which your level is with our free test and start developing all the necessary skills to open up new career opportunities and become an excellent bilingual CSM!