Customer Success Manager, Payroll - Emerging Accounts

About the role

The Customer Success Manager, Payroll owns adoption, retention, and expansion for Fourth’s large and medium-sized Payroll and PEO accounts — a smaller, higher-complexity portfolio than the general Emerging CSM book. These accounts carry more regulatory exposure, higher payroll run complexity, and greater churn cost per account, so the role trades volume for depth: fewer accounts, deeper payroll/PEO domain expertise, and tighter coordination with Payroll Operations, Tax, and Benefits. This is a specialist track within the CSM level, not a step up the management ladder — scope, financial authority, and outcomes ownership match the standard CSM tier. What differs is domain: this CSM must be able to distinguish Payroll, PEO, Tax, and Benefits issues correctly, know when something is compliance-critical, and route it through the right channel before it becomes a churn event.

Responsibilities

• Own an assigned portfolio of ~75–125 large and medium-sized Payroll and PEO accounts across the customer lifecycle — onboarding through renewal.
• Define the value moment for each account in payroll-specific terms — first clean payroll run, accurate tax setup, on-time filing, compliant benefits enrollment — and track progress against that objective, not generic usage volume.
• Partner with Payroll Operations, Tax, and Benefits teams (not a generic Services team) to monitor onboarding progress and ensure customers hit payroll-specific adoption milestones quickly.
• Monitor payroll accuracy rate and filing timeliness as leading indicators — payroll errors in the first 90 days are a high-signal predictor of churn for this segment.
• Correctly distinguish Payroll, PEO, Tax, and Benefits issues when triaging customer concerns, and flag anything compliance-critical immediately per the 24-hour escalation SLA — compliance-critical items require Compliance Lead and Legal sign-off before any resolution, not CSM judgment call.
• Identify and flag expansion opportunities and renewal risk to the CSM Manager or Sales/Account Management for commercial follow-through.
• Flag PEO at-risk accounts with elevated urgency: PEO churn remediation is an active company-level dependency before PEO acquisition can scale, so PEO retention signal on this portfolio carries outsized weight.
• Identify trends in payroll/PEO-specific customer challenges and suggest improvements to process, documentation, and automation.
• Use AI-enabled adoption and health-scoring tools tuned to payroll-specific signals (payroll accuracy, filing timeliness) to surface risk and expansion signal earlier.
• Maintain accurate, current records in Salesforce (primary CRM), and Zendesk/NetSuite as needed.
• Work cross-functionally with Payroll Operations, Tax, Benefits, Support, and Sales; operate independently with minimal day-to-day supervision.

Financial & Commercial Scope

• No signing, pricing, or discount authority. The CSM does not negotiate contract terms or approve concessions.

Outcomes Owned

• Payroll accuracy rate within portfolio.
• Time to first clean/successful payroll run.
• Filing and compliance timeliness.
• PEO account retention within portfolio.
• SLA adherence (24-hour triage) and CSAT.

Qualifications

• 1–3+ years of experience in customer success or account management specifically with payroll, PEO, or HCM accounts — general SaaS CS experience alone is not a substitute.
• Working understanding of Payroll and/or PEO fundamentals — wage/hour basics, tax filing cadence, benefits administration — sufficient to distinguish Payroll, PEO, Tax, and Benefits issues correctly when triaging.
• Experience supporting large or medium-sized accounts (higher complexity, lower volume) rather than pure high-volume SMB motion.
• Comfortable operating under compliance-critical escalation protocols — knows what requires Compliance/Legal sign-off versus what can be resolved directly.
• Proficiency in Salesforce; familiarity with Zendesk and NetSuite is a plus.
• Comfortable using AI-enabled CS/adoption tooling (health scoring, workflow automation) as part of daily account management.

Skills

• Exceptional written/verbal communication; able to explain payroll and compliance topics clearly to non-technical customer stakeholders.
• Data-driven mindset for interpreting payroll accuracy and filing-timeliness metrics against each customer’s stated objective.

Measures of Success

• Payroll accuracy rate trend within portfolio.
• Time to first clean payroll run.
• Filing/compliance timeliness.
• PEO account retention rate.
• SLA adherence and CSAT.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO.
• Medical, Dental, Vision Insurance.
• 401k Match.
• Parental Leave.
• Laptop and equipment provided.

Remote employment limited to: AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MS, NC, NE, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA, & WA.