Position SummaryReporting to the Business Unit SVP, the Director of Customer Service & Sales Support provides strategic and operational leadership for the customer service and sales support organization, ensuring a consistently high-quality experience for customers, internal sales teams, and distribution partners.
This role is responsible for leading the organization through a significant period of transformation, including the implementation and adoption of new business systems, processes, and ways of working. The Director will balance day-to-day operational excellence with longer-term transformation, ensuring service continuity while developing more efficient, scalable, and customer-focused processes.
As a key partner to Sales, Operations, Supply Chain, Finance, IT, and distribution partners, the Director will improve the end-to-end customer experience, strengthen commercial support capabilities, establish clear service standards and performance measures, and create an environment of accountability and continuous improvement.
Key ResponsibilitiesCustomer Service & Operational Leadership- Provide strategic leadership and direction for the Customer Service and Sales Support organization, establishing clear priorities, service standards, roles, and performance expectations.
- Ensure timely, accurate, and professional support throughout the customer lifecycle, including inquiries, quotations, order processing, order status, issue resolution, returns, and other post-sale activities.
- Develop and monitor key performance indicators, service-level expectations, and operating metrics to improve responsiveness, quality, productivity, and customer satisfaction.
- Identify service gaps and recurring customer issues and work cross-functionally to drive sustainable corrective actions.
- Build scalable processes capable of supporting business growth, increasing transaction volumes, evolving customer expectations, and changing go-to-market strategies.
- Establish effective escalation processes for critical customer, order, delivery, pricing, or service issues.
Sales & Distribution Partner Support- Serve as a key operational partner to internal sales teams, ensuring they have responsive and effective support throughout the sales and order fulfillment process.
- Develop a clear service model for supporting both direct customers and distribution partners, recognizing the different requirements of each channel.
- Strengthen communication and coordination among Customer Service, Sales, distributors, Operations, Supply Chain, and other business functions.
- Improve processes related to quotations, pricing administration, order management, customer information, and commercial documentation.
- Partner with Sales leadership to identify opportunities to remove administrative burden from sellers and enable greater focus on customer engagement and revenue growth.
- Develop consistent processes, tools, and expectations for supporting distributors and other channel partners.
- Act as an escalation point for complex or high-priority customer and distributor matters.
Systems Transformation & Change Leadership- Play a leadership role in the implementation and adoption of new ERP, CRM, order management, customer service, and related business systems.
- Translate business requirements and customer needs into practical system and process solutions in partnership with IT and functional stakeholders.
- Assess existing workflows and use the systems transformation as an opportunity to simplify, standardize, and automate processes rather than replicating legacy practices.
- Lead the team's preparation for system changes, including process documentation, data readiness, user acceptance testing, training, communications, and adoption.
- Develop plans to maintain customer service and business continuity through system implementation and stabilization.
- Monitor post-implementation performance, identify issues quickly, and coordinate resolution across functional and technical teams.
- Champion adoption of new tools and processes while helping employees successfully navigate significant organizational change.
Continuous & Commercial Excellence- Evaluate the end-to-end order-to-cash and customer support experience to identify opportunities to reduce complexity, cycle time, errors, and manual work.
- Establish standardized operating procedures, workflows, documentation, and service-level agreements.
- Leverage technology, automation, data, and analytics to improve efficiency and decision-making.
- Develop meaningful reporting and dashboards to provide visibility into service performance, order activity, backlog, customer issues, and operational risks.
- Create a culture of continuous improvement in which employees are empowered to identify problems and recommend solutions.
- Partner cross-functionally to address root causes rather than relying on Customer Service to compensate for upstream or downstream process deficiencies.
People Leadership & Organizational Development- Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing Customer Service and Sales Support team.
- Establish clear roles, responsibilities, performance expectations, and accountability across the organization.
- Assess organizational capabilities and recommend changes to structure, staffing, processes, and skills necessary to support future business requirements.
- Develop team capabilities in customer communication, problem solving, systems proficiency, commercial awareness, and cross-functional collaboration.
- Build succession plans and develop future leaders within the function.
- Foster a customer-focused, collaborative culture that values responsiveness, ownership, continuous improvement, and results.
Qualifications- Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Operations, Supply Chain, or a related discipline, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
- 8+ years of progressive experience in customer service, sales operations, commercial operations, order management, or related functions.
- 3+ years of significant people leadership experience, preferably leading multi-functional or geographically dispersed teams.
- Demonstrated experience improving customer-facing processes and operational performance.
- Experience supporting both direct sales organizations and distributor, dealer, or channel partner networks.
- Demonstrated ability to lead teams through organizational, process, or technology change.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making capabilities.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
