Benchmade is building the most connected, personalized, and proactive experience in the industry for every customer and dealer. The Customer Experience Manager will help lead that change. This role brings together two powerful functions: direct-to-consumer service and dealer-facing inside sales. You will lead the people delivering the experience today while building the systems, habits, and partnerships that make it better tomorrow.
The opportunity is bigger than running a queue or reporting a scorecard. You will know the numbers every day, understand the customer and dealer stories behind them, and turn what you learn into better tools, smarter processes, stronger teams, and measurable growth. You will have the room to bring a point of view, test ideas, learn quickly when something misses, and build an operation that can scale without losing the personal touches that make Benchmade special.
We are looking for a systems thinker with a growth mindset and a genuine appetite for the work of leading people. You build trust, communicate clearly, take ownership, and make the people around you better. You do not need to arrive as a knife expert. You do need to be curious about our customers, invested in our dealers, and excited to build a team that others love working with.
Responsibilities- Lead, coach, hire, develop, and manage an 11-person team spanning DTC Customer Experience and dealer/B2B operations, including a CX Lead, CX Specialist, CX Representatives, Account Coordinators, and Field Operations Coordinator; guide offshore partner performance through the CX Lead.
- Own daily performance across phone, email, chat, SMS, social, and dealer support queues. Review dashboards and customer signals every day; identify the metric, channel, process, or person needing attention and act promptly to improve outcomes.
- Build a visible operating cadence of daily queue reviews and unblockers, weekly one-on-ones and channel reviews, monthly individual and channel KPI reviews, and quarterly goal recalibration and development conversations.
- Balance service excellence with commercial execution: protect response, resolution, quality, and satisfaction outcomes while building disciplined dealer outreach, onboarding, retention, reorder, and revenue-generating habits with Account Coordinators and sales partners.
- Create practical plans from incomplete direction, assign owners and dates, make tradeoffs explicit, and raise risks early with a recommendation. Stay calm when volume spikes and focus the team on the work that matters most.
- Use CSAT, NPS, service levels, first contact resolution, quality, handle time, utilization, dealer coverage, outbound activity, and revenue data to diagnose root causes and test improvements; measure whether changes worked and adjust quickly.
- Build a scalable surprise-and-delight practice: define when a personal gesture matters, equip employees to act within clear guardrails, learn from customer feedback, and refresh the approach so it remains relevant and authentic.
- Advocate for customers, dealers, and employees by turning friction into quantified proposals for better staffing, policies, workflows, training, integrations, and tooling; carry proposals through decisions, implementation, and measured results with IT, Operations, Product, Sales, and Marketing.
- Own the effectiveness of CX technology and vendor partnerships, especially Zendesk and HubSpot workflows. Evaluate feature releases, configure and refine processes with technical partners, enforce vendor commitments, and maintain reliable data and usable reporting.
- Apply AI where it solves a defined problem. Establish data, knowledge, quality, privacy, escalation, and human-review requirements; pilot responsibly, monitor real customer outcomes, and stop or revise tools that do not deliver.
- Model strong judgment and clear communication with customers, dealers, executives, sales partners, and frontline employees. Handle escalations directly, share the truth early, and translate complexity into decisions and next steps.
- Build a cohesive, high-trust team through floor presence, consistent coaching, recognition, fair accountability, and active advocacy. Encourage informed experimentation, own misses without blame, and turn learning into the next iteration.
Qualifications- Demonstrated experience leading both consumer-facing service and business-to-business account support, inside sales, or dealer operations; able to coach service quality and commercial performance with equal credibility.
- Experience managing and developing a multi-function team, including hiring, performance management, career growth, and leaders or vendor partners who manage work on the manager's behalf.
- Proven record of improving service, customer outcomes, and commercial results using daily operating metrics, root-cause analysis, experiments, and sustained follow-through.
- Hands-on fluency with CRM and support systems, reporting, workflow design, and integrations; Zendesk and HubSpot experience preferred. Able to evaluate vendors and put new features to work.
- Practical experience evaluating automation or AI against a clear use case, data readiness, customer impact, risk controls, and measurable performance preferred.
- Ability to turn ambiguous priorities into executable plans, make sound decisions with incomplete information, surface risks early, and maintain focus under pressure.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, executive-ready recommendations, customer escalation skills, and the ability to influence partners without direct authority.
- Customer-centered judgment, commercial curiosity, willingness to try and learn quickly, and a track record of building trust through direct feedback and accountability.
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience preferred.
- Availability 7:30 a.m.-4:00 p.m. Monday-Friday. Primarily onsite with the ability to work from home as the work allows.
- Occasional overtime may be required; advance notice will be provided when possible.
Working Conditions- Working Environment: Office Position in a manufacturing facility
- Physical Demands: Lifting up to 25 lbs.; sitting and talking on the phone for extended periods of time; data entry for extended periods of time
- Travel Requirements: Occasional
