Technical Account Managers (TAMs) are skilled professionals in any organization. With great customer support skills and deep expertise in the products and services provided by their organization, Technical Account Managers advise, promote, enable, and evolve programs alongside their customers. Take a look at what a career as a TAM is all about.

What is a Technical Account Manager?

Professionals working as Technical Account Managers are platform experts with advanced client-facing skills. Excellent at seeing through complexity, TAMs help customers find the best solution to their program challenges. A major part of their role is being a project planner. They are constantly co-creating roadmaps with their customers, and participating in the delivery. Great TAMs understand their customers’ needs, translate them into technical projects, and then plan the work effectively.

At Qualtrics, our Technical Account Managers are a major part of our Enterprise Services, focusing on making sure Qualtrics’s largest enterprise clients get the strategic and technical expertise they need day-to-day, to ensure healthy long-term results for the partnership.

These Enterprise Services teams consist of Technical Account Managers (TAMs), Associate TAMS (aTAMs), and Enterprise Services Managers (ESMs). Together they help ensure enterprise clients are getting the most out of their XM programs by consulting on best practices for new and existing features.

We have our Enterprise Services teams around the globe, including major business locations like Mexico City, Mexico and Kraków, Poland.

What do Technical Account Managers do?

The Technical Account Manager team provides technical solutions and configuration services after the point of sale that directly contribute to the long-term success of their customers’ programs. Enterprise Services bridges the gap between Qualtrics teams and clients to ensure client programs operate seamlessly and effectively.

Greg Keating, the Head of Enterprise Services for EMEA, explains, “TAMs work cross-functionally to support their customers. Alongside our account team, TAMs work with our technical support, engineering and product teams, to bring the right ideas and people to their customers.”

In this way, Technical Account Managers can act on four core responsibilities: advising customers to accelerate their XM program maturity; promoting customer needs and advocating for product developments on their behalves; enabling customers through hands-on training and support the creation of an XM center of success for those customers; and, finally, evolving their XM program as new challenges or product improvements come to light.

The Day in the Life of a Technical Account Manager

This means that a “day in the life” of a Technical Account Manager can be incredibly varied. Isabel Ritrovato, a TAM based in our Provo, Utah office, shares, “I lead both client-centered and internal meetings. Some days, that means talking with our VP of Customer Experience to improve my client's experience with Qualtrics. Other days, I am working one-on-one with my client to solve a challenging issue or to strategize on a new build.”

It also means that a TAM spends their days in deep partnership with our clients. Greg explains, “Our larger programs are on the cutting edge of Experience Management. They are using our platform to gather immense amounts of feedback, to run that feedback through our analytics engine and drive actions to improve the experience of their customers/employees. Given the complexity of these programs, customers often request help from TAMs to ensure their program is technically optimised and running smoothly.”

Wellbeing as a Technical Account Manager

Technical Account Manager roles provide excellent development opportunities, while being high-demand. “It can be easy to get caught up in your work. The TAM team is a group of high-achieving customer-obsessed individuals. With that mindset, it can be easy to overbook yourself. However, as a company, Qualtrics lives Experience Management. All employees are encouraged to take time off and to maintain a healthy balance,” says Isabel.

Greg comments that it is essential to set strong expectations, “The best protection comes from building realistic project timelines with our customers. The TAMs are involved in designing the project plan and must balance their workload when making customer commitments. This can be a challenge but we’ve found that setting the right expectations is the best way to guard against an imbalanced workload.”

How to become a Technical Account Manager

Isabel shares that the key to becoming a Technical Account Manager is deep customer obsession. “Successful TAMs care about their clients. Technical prowess is a major plus, but if you can empathize with your clients and own their success, you are way ahead of things.”

The TAM role is the “next step” in career development for individuals with customer success and support experience, especially those who have worked in technical, consulting, or client-facing roles before. To find success in this space, a professional needs a proactive attitude and a desire to work autonomously. Greg explains, “Customers will express their desires but our TAMs are expected to solve customer problems as proactively as possible. If a TAM only waits for customers to voice their issues it is already too late.”

One benefit of a career with a company like Qualtrics is that the skills being developed are incredibly versatile, “The platform skills they will learn are relevant in any industry or company. Every company has areas of improvement, being able to listen to your customers and understand how to improve their experience can be applied anywhere. TAMs will get to see how some of the largest companies in the world run their experience programs. They can use that knowledge in any future role,” explains Greg.

What does career development look like for Technical Account Managers?

Our Technical Account Managers have built great careers, both at Qualtrics and beyond. Greg shares, “TAMs gain subject matter expertise from the Qualtrics platform but they also hone their client-facing skills daily. These skills can lead to career paths in customer success or even sales. If a TAM wants to veer into heavier technical topics they can, and head down an engineering or product career path. Our most tenured TAMs often pursue people leadership within our team.” He also shares that TAMs can carry their strong platform knowledge, client-facing skills, and technical know-how into many other roles.

The result is that someone interested in having a deep career in customer success can continue their development year after year, with both greater platform expertise and customer-facing skills, as well as opportunities to pursue leadership roles.

When considering a career as a Technical Account Manager, there are many factors to look at. At Qualtrics, “[i]t is clear [we] value hard work and make every effort to reward those who go above and beyond,” shares Isabel.

Apart from gaining satisfaction from doing excellent work, we see that our teams have every opportunity to have their voices heard. “I get a sense of development by seeing our work through the eyes of our team. Everyone has different ideas of what is the best way to do things so I’m always learning from my team,” says Greg.

A career at Qualtrics means joining a company that has created a new business priority with Experience Management. The opportunity to leave a mark, both on this organization and the organizations of our 20,000+ customers, means that whatever your own career goals, you can find work worth doing within our team.

To learn more about Qualtrics careers, visit our Career site today.