Director of Customer Success

Department: Sales

Location: Hybrid - London ( 2 days a week in the London office with travel to customer locations across the UK)

Reports to: Senior Director, New Business

Hours: 37.5  per week

Salary: Depending on experience

A quick note before you apply: We are only able to accept applications from candidates who are currently based in the UK and hold the legal right to work here.

Role Overview: 

We are looking for a commercially minded Director of Customer Success to transform and scale our Customer Success function. 

Cambridge Spark is entering an exciting new chapter of growth. We are winning some of the UK's largest enterprises, securing multi-million-pound commitments and helping organisations transform their businesses through AI and Data. You will be regularly partnering with both strategic and operational stakeholders from across the technology, people, and business teams on the customer side. Our GTM organisation has become a high-performing commercial engine. Customer Success is central to the next stage of that growth. You will lead an established CS team and shape it into a strategically led function that drives customer value and commercial growth at enterprise scale. 

You will build a function that establishes a world-class approach to demonstrating customer ROI, building strategic relationships with senior executives, and turning customer success into a measurable driver of revenue growth, customer engagement and client retention. With a rapidly expanding customer base amid strong commercial momentum this is a rare opportunity to build something of lasting importance and play a defining role in Cambridge Spark's next phase of growth.

Your mandate has the following core priorities:

• Commercial Transformation: Build a proactive motion that strengthens buying relationships, generates qualified expansion opportunities and contributes to revenue growth.
• Engagement and Renewals: Keep sponsors and learners engaged throughout their programmes, spot risk early, and secure renewals and repeat cohorts across our enterprise accounts.
• Customer Value Creation: Define, measure and communicate the business impact of our AI and Data programmes, turning customer outcomes into renewed and expanded investment.
• Team and Operating Model: Develop the current team, establish scalable processes and recruit enterprise-calibre talent to support our growth.

Key responsibilities:

Strategic Retention & Growth 

• Own the baseline, playing a key role in driving robust GRR/NRR across the client roster; helping to scale use cases carrying the highest customer value, and the greatest revenue opportunity for Cambridge Spark.
• Work with Delivery to track learner progress, completion and achievement across our apprenticeship and custom programmes, and act early where engagement drops.
• Build a Customer Success strategy that generates measurable CS-sourced pipeline and sales-accepted Customer Success Qualified Leads (CSQLs), working with Sales to turn opportunities into booked revenue.
• Develop multi-threaded relationships with L&D champions, business sponsors and C-suite leaders; turn successful customers into advocates and references.

Customer Value Creation & ROI

• Ensure your CSM team captures success criteria and business objectives during the sales process, and turn them into measurable success plans and structured handovers. 
• Drive strategic Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) that evidence measurable impact, address challenges and identify where customers should double down or change direction.
• Build a data-led CS practice: capture data across the customer journey, use EDUKATE and delivery data to spot risks and improve the experience, and turn it into high-value client reporting and ROI evidence.
• Turn customer results into case studies, references and impact evidence that support renewals, new business and tenders.

Customer Success Leadership & Transformation

• Coach and elevate the existing CSM team in strategic discovery, executive communication, commercial judgement and performance; grow the team as the business scales.
• Set the standard for enterprise customer engagement, across all accounts and within our specialist sector teams.
• Build a disciplined operating rhythm, with clear KPIs, account plans, and accountability for performance.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Execution

• Establish a joined-up operating model between Customer Success, Sales and Delivery, with clear responsibilities and regular joint account planning prioritising early risk detection.
• Act as a senior strategic contact and escalation point for major enterprise accounts, balancing customer advocacy with commercial priorities.
• Contribute further by actively engaging in customer advisory initiatives, and public representation of Cambridge Spark, as and when required.

Candidate Specification: 

Essential

• Enterprise Customer Success leadership: A strong track record leading Customer Success or strategic account management in complex B2B organisations, ideally technology or technology-enabled services.
• Commercial credibility: Demonstrable success creating expansion opportunities, influencing revenue and navigating complex buying groups.
• Builder and change leader: Experience developing or materially transforming a CS function, rather than solely maintaining an established model.
• Value realisation: Able to turn customer objectives and operational data into credible ROI narratives and persuasive executive reviews.
• People leadership: Proven capability in coaching, hiring, setting high standards and managing performance.
• Operating discipline: Experience with QBRs, customer success plans, segmentation and cross-functional execution; comfortable in a fast-moving scale-up.

Desirable

• Background in enterprise SaaS, AI/data technology, consulting, professional services or workforce transformation.
• Experience designing CSQL or expansion motions; familiarity with MEDDIC or consultative sales qualification.
• Exposure to learning and development, professional education or UK apprenticeship funding.

What Makes You Different

You see Customer Success as a growth engine, not a reporting or support function. You are an excellent listener, commercially curious and able to connect learner outcomes to the priorities of senior business leaders.

You have raised the bar in a team before. You can coach a CSM, challenge an account strategy, present ROI to executives and navigate operational complexity and ambiguity at pace. .

What We Are NOT Looking For

• Leaders whose experience is limited to reactive customer servicing, satisfaction reporting or administrative account management.
• People who have only inherited mature CS operations and are uncomfortable building processes, coaching teams or driving change.
• Leaders who separate customer outcomes from commercial results, or who cannot work in lockstep with Sales and Delivery.

Company Benefits: 

• Pension with 4% matched contributions, opportunity to opt into salary sacrifice scheme
• 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
• A day for volunteering
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave 
• Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
• Annual Summer and Xmas events
• Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
• CPD Allowance alongside quarterly reflections to ring fence time for development and growth
• Private medical insurance and cash plan
• Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
• Employee Assistance Programme with a dedicated company counsellor

Background to our Organisation

We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.

We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.

Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m. 

Our Values

At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:

Entrepreneurial

We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.

Team Spirit

Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.

Customer-focused

Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.

Gold Standard

We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.

____________________________________________________________________________

Cambridge Spark is an Equal Opportunities Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind.  Cambridge Spark is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunities for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Cambridge Spark are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour or ethnicity, ability or disability, gender or gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Cambridge Spark will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Cambridge Spark encourages applicants of all ages.