Customer Success Advocate

Ciena is committed to our people-first philosophy. Our teams enjoy a culture focused on prioritizing a personalized and flexible work environment that empowers an individual’s passions, growth, wellbeing and belonging. We’re a technology company that leads with our humanity—driving our business priorities alongside meaningful social, community, and societal impact.


As Customer Success Advocate you will be responsible for development and nurturing the relationships of Ciena’s Top Customers. The Success Advocate promotes retention, loyalty and advocacy by developing & driving a World Class Customer Experience. The Success Advocate is the primary contact for driving customer outcomes, customer intake, onboarding, and issues prevention by ensuring alignment between operations and contractual requirements to proactively prevent issues, creating a near effortless journey throughout the customers lifecycle.

Customer Success is absolutely vital to Ciena’s long-term growth & profitability. We will be successful when our customers recognize they are receiving tangible value from Ciena products and services.

The Contribution:

- Align Ciena’s services to strategically meet customer needs to retain as well as expand business and deepen the relationship
- Establish yourself as the de facto trusted advisor with all customers by developing rock solid customer relationships across your customer’s business including Engineering, Operations, Finance, Procurement, and Implementation.
- Foster a success-oriented, accountable environment within the Services organization and company.
- Closely collaborate with Sales to deliver a positive and welcoming onboarding experience for our customers making sure the Customers Success Value Points and Outcomes are fully understood and documented.
- Ensure that key hand-offs during the customer lifecycle are executed flawlessly with no negative impact to the customer experience.
- Meet with customers to understand their goals and the value Ciena can bring to their business by identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities that can help Customer expand & improve their business.
- Ability to analyze customer base and recommend effective segmentation to drive appropriate customer interactions and touchpoints
- Initiate and maintain comprehensive Customer Success Plans & Playbooks that define and document Customer Journey, Persona Maps & Key Success Indicators in support of driving new business growth and greater advocacy and reference-ability
- Collaborating with Account Management and Delivery & Service teams, foster a success oriented and accountable environment, ensure that Ciena’s customers achieve their desired outcomes and maximize value of Ciena’s Services
- Drive and influence the value, usage and adoption of our products and services using metrics developed collaboratively with other functional teams. Leverage understanding of data analytics and best practices.
- By closely monitoring customer success health and key indicators and close Customer interaction, take the lead in proactively resolving customer specific product and services issues prior to a negative impact to the Customers Experience.
- Ensure prompt response and information delivery of Customer requests and queries in local language
- Work collaboratively with our Sales Team and the Customer Technical Advocate to assists with accurate and on time renewals with new services identified that drive improved outcomes for our customers.
- Conduct regular customer operational and business reviews, highlighting customer success achievements, proactively suggesting solutions to customer concerns, and driving identified improvement opportunities

Success will evidence itself in the following ways:

- Customer delight
- Expanded account revenue through cross-sell and up-sell
- Increased Customer retention and lower churn rate, increased and faster product adoption, increased customer satisfaction and overall improved customer health scores
- Increased business growth through greater advocacy and reference-ability
- Defined and established operational tracking metrics for team and customer
- Fostered collaboration within team and across customer lifecycle

Ideal Profile:
A highly energetic and relationship driven customer facing individual who is knowledgeable about the technology marketplace, dynamics, and trends and wants to make an impact on the future of communications. You are looking for a company where you have the opportunity to pursue your interests across multiple business functions and geographies. You bring to the organization the following competencies:

- Leadership qualities with high integrity.
- Out of the box thinker - Change Agent
- Ability to influence through persuasion, negotiation, and consensus building
- Ideally a combined background of both pre-sales and post-sales experience
- Strong analytical skills and a deep understanding of value drivers and KPI in recurring revenue business mode