****Customer Relationship Manager****

**What we do**

Ascend is a fintech company building a financing and payments infrastructure for insurance (which is not as boring as it seems). Its a $900bn market with 40% of premiums still paid via paper checks ????. Todays solutions were built 40 years ago for pen and paper insurance sales and as a result are under-penetrated and inefficient.

**How we do it**

Ascend automates insurance payments end-to-end from online customer payments and financing to the distribution of commissions and carrier payables so that distributors can eliminate laborious, expensive processes while giving your customers the great online checkout and financing experience theyve come to expect. Think Stripe Affirm for insurance.

**Why we do it**

We exist to make it easier for people to protect the things they care about by simplifying and modernizing the insurance industrys financial infrastructure.

**Your Role**

As our first Relationship Manager, youll be a key member of our business development team to ensure we are driving adoption and engagement of our product. This role works with new and existing business and enterprise customers to ensure that they are extremely delighted by Ascend. You will be responsible for effectively activating customers and building high customer satisfaction. Youll help create repeatable, scalable tactics to activate and engage our customer base. Your goals are to drive adoption and customer engagement as well as gain insights and be the voice of your customers internally at Ascend. Your relationship with accounts will be critical both in terms of customer retention and ensuring that Ascend keeps a finger on the pulse of customer needs and interests. You can comfortably manage numerous customers at different stages of the customer lifecycle. You are a naturally curious person, get excited by understanding products in depth, and are great at communicating solutions to users.

Youll report to the Head of Strategic Partnerships, working closely with company leadership and product to constantly iterate and improve our deliverables and processes.

**Responsibilities will include**

* Manage all post-sales activity for Ascends business and enterprise customers through strong relationship-building, product knowledge, planning and execution

* Maintain a deep understanding of the product in order to speak with customers about the most relevant features/functionality for their specific business needs

* Increase customer retention by conducting regular check-in calls for tactical items and preparing monthly account reports for C-level executives and decision-makers

* Track accounts to identify churn risk and work actively to improve customer health and retention

* Function as the customer advocate and provide internal feedback on how Ascend can better serve our enterprise customers

* Partner with Sales to help scale Ascends internal processes and to improve sales processes based on customer feedback

* Partners with Product and Engineering on identifying product improvement requests and bugs

**You might be a good fit if you:**

* Have a strong desire to learn new skills and business problems

* Are comfortable with ambiguity and pace of early stage startup

* Are able to drive customer onboarding, implementation and consultation

* Are able to design and build out processes that align with customer needs

* Are a proactive team player with ideas about customer activation, churn mitigation, and proactive alerts and reports to improve customer experience

* Have a Bachelors degree or strong work experience

* Have prior account management experience or equivalent

* Have strong communication skills and technical aptitude

* Are a proactive team player with fresh ideas when it comes to user adoption and churn mitigation

* Enjoy working closely with customers and high social IQ when it comes to customer service

* Are a self-starter who takes the initiative to get things done

* Are highly collaborative

* Are familiar with Salesforce, Zendesk, and other Software-as-a-Service (preferred)

* Have experience in SaaS (preferred)

**Benefits**

* Highly competitive base salary and meaningful equity in a fast-growing company.

* We have offices in NYC and Palo Alto, but also open to 100% remote / WFH

* Flexible vacation policy to encourage people to recharge and get offline.

* WFH Equipment & Laptop: Laptop of your choice and $1,000 work from home equipment budget.

* Parental leave (14 weeks primary caregiver / 6 weeks secondary caregiver), and flexibility for families

* 100% world-class Health, Dental, Vision for you and your dependents.

**Diversity, Equity and Inclusion**

The Ascend team is diverse by design with the goal of being made up of 50% of employees from underrepresented backgrounds in tech (46% today). Our team members come from world-class technology companies like Instacart, Uber, Pinterest, Amazon, Houseparty, Circleup, LinkedIn, Hippo Insurance, and Atlassian. The combination of people with unique and varied backgrounds and experiences truly enables us to innovate and approach this antiquated industry from first-principles. Ascend is committed to creating and fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. This is not just because its something we should do but because we deeply believe a diverse workplace where team members are from underrepresented backgrounds result in a better, stronger business and culture. Here are some ways we are committed to building such a workplace: We have DE&I hiring goals and metrics that we track closely to ensure underrepresented and diverse candidates are sourced and recruited first so they are at the top of the hiring funnel. We discuss these weekly just like all of our other KPIs. We post jobs to places like People of Color in Tech, Include, and Diversify Tech first.

We work closely with external resources and our investors who share the same commitment to diversity to implement best practices to foster a welcoming, inclusive culture. We help identify and fund activities, resources, and support opportunities for individuals from underrepresented backgrounds. Examples include FirstRound Fast Track program and FirstMark Guilds.

If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at johanna@useascend.com.

**Equal Opportunity**

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

**How to apply**