Director, Customer Support at DonorsChooseorg in New York, NY

In this role, you’ll report to the Senior Vice President, Operations and will:

Manage

• Directly manage a Readiness Manager, a Service Manager, and lead a team of ~16 distributed Specialists working remotely (permanently) across the country.
• Actively engage with your leadership staff to create a customer support team culture, which includes a positive and productive work environment.
• Maintain the highest standards to drive the professional development of all team members.

Lead

• Own the overall success of customer support processes and key metrics (e.g., resolution time, one-touch resolution, response time). You’ll use learnings from our data to continue to build “best-in-class” customer support that drives Specialist and customer satisfaction.
• Provide direction and vision to advance, and help team members advance, strategic priorities — such as the development of an asynchronous training program, ongoing development of an internal knowledge base, refinement of a customer-facing help center, etc.
• Build annual models to project workload based on revenue and project goals — and build appropriate annual staffing plans.
• Own relationships with external vendors for tools and services and explore new products to enhance our support ecosystem.
• Proactively scale customer support with a relentless focus on excellence.

Collaborate

• Internally represent the team and customers' needs, rising trends, and ideas for product, process, and policy changes to improve the customer experience and reduce customer support contact. This is done primarily through collaboration with the Program Management team.
• Represent DonorsChoose core values to customers through friendly, empathetic, and solutions-focused service.

Qualifications

This position might be for you if you are:

• An experienced customer support manager. You’re eager to lead a large remote team; you thrive when leading a team and feel rewarded by your team’s success. You enjoy helping people grow professionally and you give them the autonomy and space to grow and learn. You’ve led a distributed team.
• Passionate about excellent support. You are excited about providing top-notch customer support and being a driving force behind the support our customers have come to expect. At least four years of customer support experience is ideal.
• A customer support expert. You’ve done direct customer-facing support in the past and know the demands of working in a variable workload environment. You have ideas for lifting morale and productivity. You’re not afraid to jump in on a sticky customer situation. You know first hand what works for this work! And you have experience with multichannel (or, even better, multimodal) support across email, chat, and phone.
• Mission driven. You care deeply about education and share our organization’s commitment to racial and economic equity in America’s public schools.
• Results oriented and data driven. You have a strong command of customer support data and analytics and you set measurable goals and analyze progress.
• Strategic. You have a proven ability to set, communicate, meet, and measure short- and long-term goals. You have the ability to drive action and make tough decisions and you can give us some examples of doing so!
• Innovative. You thrive in work environments with changing needs and resources, and you remain calm and retain your sense of humor in the face of unexpected changes. You’re not afraid of exploring new technologies that could enhance the customer experience or increase our efficiency.
• Not afraid to fail forward—and learn. You’re all for a well-calculated risk—and you encourage your team to follow suit and learn from success and failure.
• Results oriented and data driven. You set measurable goals and analyze progress.
• People oriented. You are excited to get to know your employees, notice when extra attention is needed and offer it, and find new ways to lead and advocate for your team.
• Assured under pressure. You’re quick to think critically and completely through emerging issues, quickly solving problems and communicating the solutions clearly to the right people at the right times.
• Open-minded. Curious, creative, and open to sharing and learning from successes and failures? Yes! You’re willing to take and implement ideas from anywhere and excited to learn from your peers.
• A learner. You believe in continuous improvement, and you’ll exemplify our core value of user ­focus when it comes to your team, your colleagues, and your customers.