Senior Consultant, Client Success Merchants

Visa is a world leader in payments and technology, with over 259 billion payments transactions flowing safely between consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government entities in more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable, and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive while driven by a common purpose – to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

Make an impact with a purpose-driven industry leader. Join us today and experience Life at Visa.

The Senior Consultant, Client Success Manager is an individual contributor responsible for owning the overall post-sale Client Services relationship for applicable clients (merchants) providing operational and optimisation solutions in support of growing our clients’ businesses and achieving their strategic growth priorities by achieving the highest value and impact from Visa’s products and services.

You will be a trusted client advocate and works proactively with their client portfolio to optimize and expand adoption of the clients’ Visa product portfolio, enable new capabilities, support geographic expansion, identify Visa product and service sales opportunities whilst helping the client say up to date on Visa rules, mandates and regulatory requirements.

The role requires a high level of professionalism, leadership and interpersonal skills to manage relationships with a variety of internal and client stakeholders. 

This role is an exciting opportunity to be at the forefront of Visa’s Client Success transformation by partnering closely with Visa’s clients to maximize their benefits realization and value from Visa products through optimizing their performance in both the face to face and card not present environment. 

This role serves as a functional specialist, located in Europe and focused on French market, but also work on clients across Europe (as relevant) and reporting to French, Belgium, Luxembourg (FBL)Client Services Lead

Responsibilities include:

• The Sr Consultant CSM for Merchants will be considered the functional expert for their clients processing and operational business. In addition, the key responsibilities outlined below for this role as part of the FBL Client Services Client Success team.
• Define and deploy client support and service implementation strategies, including automated tools and capabilities to enhance the client experience, that drive value for our clients and support Visa’s strategy.
• Work in conjunction with Account Team members from Sales and Product, you will proactively drive Client Success outcomes in alignment with Visa’s business agenda as detailed in the Sales Account Plan. 
• Engaging with the relevant Acquirer entities and their assigned CSMs and expected to work across the stakeholders driving outcomes for their assigned merchants so all parties remain compliant with Visa standard and rules whilst optimising their outputs from the Visa products and services.
• Takes ownership & accountability for the overall client services experience for a set of assigned Merchants across Europe, to develop and maintain strong relationships with merchants, acting as their primary point of contact for all Visa-related inquiries and support.
• Liaise and collaborate across Visa to ensure their client’s needs are understood.
• To coordinate, communicate and govern client readiness for mandates, enterprise, and market initiatives, including, but not exclusive to Business Enhancements, and with a particular focus on where mandates apply to acquirers that merchants also need to act upon – to ensure the collective Visa ecosystem is aligned and within compliance
• Provide insight and input within cross functional Visa organizations for new or changing products and services which may impact their clients, including Visa rules and transaction research.
• Act as liaison for the client provide problem management, proactive identification of processing efficiencies, service change support and system enhancement support. Noting that often for merchants this will require alignment with acquirers and to reach across the ecosystem and market that merchants may need to drive
• Provide proactive planning and operational support to ensure that both the client and Visa are operating in the most effective and cost-efficient manner whilst managing costs and increasing overall transaction performance (including authorization, usage, clearing & settlement, back-office processing) and then providing insights and recommendations for improvement.
• Represent complex customer change requests, system or operational requirements negotiate and manage expectations internally and externally.
• Gather feedback from merchants and collaborate with internal teams to enhance Visa's offerings and address any gaps.
• Stay current with the latest local market trends, payment processing trends, Visa solutions and technologies to provide a great Client experience and generate new sales leads as solutions to identified client pain points.
• Identify and analyse processing issues with client impacts consistently communicate situational status and resolution advise on SLA performance both internally and externally and develop improvement plans to address chronic client problems.
• Provide training and ongoing support to merchants, helping them maximize the use of Visa's products and services.
• Develop/ contribute to client education and training materials (including webinars) to communicate new Visa Rules, essential mandates, Visa Business Enhancement Releases and/or upcoming changes to ensure client readiness and service compliance.
• Partner with merchant sales, product and business development teams to identify additional business opportunities.
• Perform ongoing proactive operational reviews with client to include billing and transaction processing, identifying, and discussing opportunities to make improvements, including the preparation of regular reports on merchant performance, satisfaction, and any issues, sharing insights with relevant stakeholders.
• Crisis management – To disseminate approved Corporate Communications’ messages to clients and maintain ongoing interaction with clients to meet their specific needs throughout a crisis event, coordinating and escalating queries where appropriate (as per agreed Crisis Management Plan).
• Oversee the implementation of new Visa products the Client purchases by coordinating key Client and Visa teams to expedite implementation readiness activities and steer the client toward getting faster time to value and maximize adoption of deployed products.
• Ensure Client operational goals and success metrics for their overall Visa product landscape are understood.
• Build and sustain a trusted client advocate status with key client stakeholders by proactively executing against forward looking Client Success Plans, in alignment with the Account Team, to track client specific outcomes including a client’s adoption and performance of Visa products purchased.
• Drive and deliver initiatives to improve client adoption of products and use of Visa’s self-service tools.
• Lead periodic operational reviews with clients and Visa stakeholders at market/ regional or global level (as applicable).
• Act, on an ad-hoc and as needed basis for applicable clients, as the escalation point for managing significant issues and major incident/crisis responses.
• Proactively identify and drive opportunities to optimize client performance by monitoring client performance and liaising with specialist Visa teams as needed.
• As applicable, coordinate with global, regional and/or in-market Client Success team members to maintain a continuous 360-degree view of the Client and deliver a consistent operational relationship experience.
• Delivering Operational Resilience Support - to disseminate approved Corporate Communications’ messages to clients and maintain ongoing interaction with clients to meet their specific needs throughout a crisis event, coordinating and escalating queries where appropriate (as per agreed Crisis Management Plan).

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

• Experience in a customer success or customer services role in financial services, payment cards, software or information services industries.
• Excellent verbal, written, presentation and interpersonal skills are required.
• In-depth knowledge of the payment and ideally retail industry with understanding of regulatory requirements for payments
• Analytical skills to extract and synthesize relevant data into business solutions and provide sound analysis
• Able to communicate complex technical terms and processes in business language tailored to client environment
• Self-starter able to achieve results as part of an effective team (across countries and time zones) and execute with minimal supervision
• Able to effectively prioritize and multi-task under deadlines
• Good project planning and project management capability and experience is an added advantage
• Experience representing technical and business issues and solutions to influence audiences at multiple levels of an organization, including executives, in support of strategic business plans
• Experience using data points to create storyline within the context of client use cases will also be advantageous
• Certifications or qualifications in Client and Customer Success, project management or related areas of practice and expertise is a strong advantage.
• Fluent in both French and English
• Intermediate to expert proficiency in the following skills:

1. Building client relationships - Build credibility and create trust-based relations and partner with clients to build their business alongside strong expectation management to encourage clients to leverage all of Visa support tools and processes and teams
2. Customer centricity - Listen to and prioritize customer needs to drive value realization and build trusted partnerships whilst being confident in their client relationship to set expectations and also hold clients accountable for their adherence to Visa standards and rules
3. Success planning - Build measurable actions plans to help clients achieve their business goals and realize value from their products and solutions driven against the objectives that matter most to the clients
4. Client engagement - Communicate clearly and effectively with clients with relevant data points and within the context of the client’s user stories
5. Proactiveness - Think ahead and take action to prevent issues and anticipate gains and opportunities for the client, and plan ahead collectively against client’s overall plans and timelines
6. Critical thinking - Take ownership over problems and find creative solutions to complex problems encouraging automation and simplicity of process as far as possible

Visa is an EEO Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.