Job SummaryThe Customer Experience & Technical Support Manager is a hands-on leader responsible for guiding Mission Communications' technical support team while elevating the customer experience for utilities that rely on Mission's cloud-based monitoring, telemetry, RTU, and SCADA solutions. This role requires strong technical aptitude, calm judgment during critical customer issues, proactive communication, and the willingness to work alongside the team to troubleshoot, train, escalate, and follow through on customer-impacting issues.
Key ResponsibilitiesCustomer Experience
- Lead customer communication for key issues, critical events, outages, and high-value accounts, ensuring updates are clear, timely, professional, and reassuring.
- Strengthen the customer experience by setting expectations for tone, ownership, responsiveness, follow-up, and communication quality across calls, emails, tickets, and other customer interactions.
- Support proactive outreach to customers, including follow-up on recurring issues, service trends, training opportunities, and accounts that may need additional attention.
- Help protect customer retention by ensuring customers feel supported, informed, and confident in Mission's solutions.
- Act as a voice of the customer in cross-functional discussions, identifying recurring pain points, service gaps, and opportunities to improve the support experience.
- Partner with Sales and leadership on high-value customer concerns, escalations, retention risks, and relationship-sensitive issues.
- Ensure marquee and strategic customers receive appropriate follow-through before, during, and after customer-impacting events.
- Annual travel domestically 10-25% of the time, to customer sites, trade shows, industry events, distributor meetings, and other business activities as needed.
Technical Support Operations
- Lead, coach, and support a team of Technical Support Specialists while remaining hands-on and willing to assist with troubleshooting, ticket follow-up, escalations, and customer communication when needed.
- Develop a strong working knowledge of Mission's products, telemetry solutions, RTUs, SCADA platform, customer workflows, and common field issues.
- Manage daily support workflows, including ticket queue review, case assignment, ticket aging, escalation follow-up, workload balancing, and documentation quality.
- Serve as an escalation point for critical customer issues, outages, service-impacting events, and complex technical support concerns.
- Provide backup or escalation support during critical events, staffing gaps, or urgent coverage needs, which may occasionally occur outside normal business hours.
- Monitor key service metrics such as ticket volume, response time, resolution time, aged cases, escalations, recurring issues, and customer satisfaction trends.
- Strengthen support playbooks, knowledge base content, training materials, standard responses, and escalation procedures.
- Train and coach team members on troubleshooting approach, product knowledge, documentation, customer communication, and escalation discipline.
- Partner with Engineering, Field Service, Operations, Sales, and leadership to coordinate resolution of customer-impacting technical issues.
- Identify opportunities to improve support processes, reduce repeat issues, and create a more proactive customer support model.
- Ensure weekend, after-hours, and on-call activity is followed up, documented, and communicated appropriately.
- Other duties as assigned.
Minimum Qualifications- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, Business, or a related field; equivalent technical support, field service, sales engineering, technical account management, or customer-facing technical leadership experience may be considered.
- 7+ years of experience in technical support, customer-facing technical service, field service support, sales engineering, technical account management, customer support operations, or a related customer-facing technical role.
- 3+ years of experience building and managing customer relationships in a technical, industrial, field service, utilities, infrastructure, automation, or mission-critical customer environment.
- Experience leading, supervising, or providing day-to-day direction to a technical support, customer support, field service, inside sales support, application engineering, or customer-facing technical team.
- Working knowledge of SCADA, telemetry, remote monitoring, RTUs, industrial automation, connected devices, or similar technical systems.
- Experience supporting customers in a technical environment where responsiveness, uptime, issue resolution, and customer confidence are critical.
- Experience managing ticket queues, support workflows, escalations, service metrics, customer follow-up, and documentation standards.
- Experience using ticketing systems, dashboards, or customer management tools to track issues, manage follow-up, identify trends, and improve support visibility.
- Strong customer presence, with the ability to build trust, communicate proactively, and engage confidently with key accounts, frustrated customers, and internal stakeholders.
- Strong technical aptitude with the ability to learn Mission's products, customer workflows, troubleshooting processes, and field-related issues.
- Ability to remain calm, professional, and solution-focused during urgent customer issues, outages, escalations, or service-impacting events.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate technical information into clear, customer-friendly language.
- Proven ability to prioritize, delegate, and manage multiple customer-impacting issues or workstreams simultaneously.
- Experience building or refining customer communication standards, proactive outreach programs, knowledge base content, escalation procedures, or support processes.
- Proficiency with standard business tools such as Microsoft Office, including Excel, Word, Outlook, and Teams.
Preferred Qualifications- Familiarity with the water and wastewater industry, lift stations, or similar industrial environments.
- Hands-on experience with RTUs, PLCs, HMIs, telemetry, SCADA, industrial automation, or IoT-based monitoring platforms.
- Inside sales, sales engineering, application engineering, or technical account management experience supporting customer needs, product adoption, retention, or account growth.
Working Conditions- Annual domestic travel of approximately 10-25% to customer sites, trade shows, industry events, distributor meetings, and other business activities as needed.
- Physical Demands:Must be able to sit for extended periods of time and use hands/fingers to operate computer equipment, phones, and standard office tools. Must be able to stand, walk, bend, reach, and move throughout office, manufacturing, customer, or field-related environments as needed. Must be able to occasionally lift, carry, or move items up to 25 lbs.
- Visual Demands:Look at a computer monitor for extended periods.
- Manufacturing Environment:Primarily office/computer-based work, with occasional exposure to manufacturing, technical, customer, or field-related environments. These environments may involve machinery, equipment, noise, industrial conditions, or active operational sites.
