Manager, Customer Care-Americas
We are searching for an experienced Manager, Customer Care-Americas at our Grand Rapids facility.
The Manager, Customer Care - Americas provides leadership for the Customer Care function across Philadelphia, Grand Rapids, and Anaheim and directly leads the Customer Care Managers responsible for each site. Reporting to the Director of Commercial Operations, this role is accountable for consistent service execution, team performance, continuous improvement, and the development of a strong leadership and talent pipeline across the region. The Manager translates business priorities and customer needs into clear operating plans, uses data to identify risk and opportunity, and works across the order-to-cash process to resolve systemic issues and improve customer experience.
This is a leadership role first. The Manager establishes expectations, creates accountability, develops the Customer Care Managers and their teams, and ensures priorities are completed through disciplined follow-through. Routine Customer Care transactions are delegated through the organization; the Manager provides hands-on support when needed for business continuity or a critical customer escalation without allowing transactional work to displace leadership responsibilities.
Primary Responsibilities and Essential Functions
• Provide unified leadership and direction for Customer Care across the Philadelphia, Grand Rapids, and Anaheim sites through the Customer Care Manager at each location, creating consistent expectations while addressing site-specific business needs.
• Own the performance-management system for the Americas Customer Care organization. Use strategic indicators such as response and acknowledgement performance, order-entry quality, backlog health, date-management compliance, escalation aging, delivery performance, and complaint trends to set priorities, drive action plans, hold teams accountable, and communicate results.
• Use data and structured root-cause reviews to identify recurring failure points, emerging customer risks, capacity constraints, and process gaps; establish corrective actions with clear owners, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
• Lead continuous-improvement initiatives from definition through sustained adoption. Adjust priorities as business needs change while maintaining ownership and driving the highest-impact work to completion.
• Partner cross-functionally across the full order-to-cash process, including Sales, Planning and IBP, Operations, Quality, Pricing, Finance and Accounts Receivable, Supply Chain, Information Technology, and Commercial Operations. Represent Customer Care in business reviews, improvement programs, system implementations, and customer escalations.
• Ensure customer needs, commitments, risks, and feedback are accurately represented to the business and that internal decisions are translated into clear, timely customer communication.
• Establish and enforce escalation standards for missed orders, delivery risk, line-down exposure, quality concerns, pricing or credit holds, and other issues that may materially affect the customer.
• Standardize and continuously improve Customer Care policies, work instructions, controls, and tools across all Americas locations while maintaining compliance with quality-system and business requirements.
• Oversee onboarding, role-based training, cross-training, and competency assessment. Build career paths and succession plans by identifying individual strengths and development needs and creating opportunities that improve capability, engagement, and organizational bench strength.
• Set clear performance expectations and provide timely coaching and feedback. Address performance and conduct concerns directly, consistently, and in partnership with Human Resources, including appropriate documentation and corrective action.
• Lead workforce, staffing, and coverage planning across sites, including workload balancing, backup coverage, continuity planning, and talent acquisition in partnership with Human Resources.
• Develop Customer Care Managers to make sound decisions, manage daily execution, coach their teams, and resolve issues at the appropriate level.
• Promote a positive, customer-focused culture grounded in Oliver's values, open communication, shared accountability, and continuous learning.
• Perform other job-related duties as assigned by the Director of Commercial Operations.
Leadership Accountabilities
• Enterprise perspective: Balances customer, employee, operational, financial, and compliance needs when setting direction and making decisions.
• Performance leadership: Converts goals into clear expectations, measurable actions, and sustained results across multiple locations.
• Accountability: Addresses difficult issues promptly, communicates decisions directly, and holds self and others accountable for commitments.
• Talent development: Coaches at the individual and team level, recognizes strengths, closes capability gaps, and builds succession readiness.
• Change leadership: Creates structure and clarity during change, earns adoption, and adapts execution plans as conditions evolve.
• Cross-functional influence: Builds productive partnerships, surfaces tradeoffs, and aligns stakeholders around decisions that improve customer and business outcomes.
Basic Qualifications
Education
• Bachelor's degree in business, operations, supply chain, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
Experience
• Seven or more years of progressive experience in customer care, customer operations, order management, commercial operations, or a related function.
• Five or more years of people-leadership experience, including demonstrated responsibility for performance management, coaching, corrective action, and talent development.
• Demonstrated experience leading teams through operational change and using performance data to establish priorities and improve results.
• Experience working across multiple functions within an order-to-cash environment.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience leading a multi-site or geographically distributed customer care organization, including leadership of team leads or people managers.
• Experience in healthcare packaging, medical devices, regulated manufacturing, or another quality-system-driven environment.
• Working knowledge of SAP S/4HANA or a comparable ERP platform, Microsoft Dynamics or a comparable CRM platform, and reporting or analytics tools.
• Experience with continuous-improvement methods, process standardization, change management, and technology-enabled workflow improvement.
• Experience establishing KPI governance, identifying root causes, and leading corrective actions to measurable completion.
Knowledge Skills and Abilities
• Strong judgment and the ability to make timely decisions using incomplete or changing information.
• Ability to interpret operational data, recognize patterns, distinguish symptoms from root causes, and translate findings into practical action.
• Clear and credible written and verbal communication with employees, customers, and leaders at all levels of the organization.
• Ability to lead difficult conversations with professionalism, consistency, and respect.
• Strong coaching, facilitation, conflict-resolution, and employee-relations skills.
• Ability to manage competing priorities across locations while maintaining focus on the most significant customer and business risks.
• Demonstrated follow-through, organization, and attention to detail, including clear ownership and timely escalation of commitments and risks.
• Customer-focused mindset with the ability to balance responsiveness with operational feasibility, quality requirements, and sound business decisions.
• Proficiency with Microsoft 365 applications and the ability to learn and effectively use ERP, CRM, planning, reporting, and workflow systems.
Working Conditions
• Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
• Hybrid work arrangement with an expectation of being on-site Monday through Thursday. Remote work is optional on Fridays, based on business needs and company policy.
• Must be able to lift up to 10 pounds.
Special Requirements
• Ability to travel among the Philadelphia, Grand Rapids, and Anaheim locations.
• Ability to work outside normal business hours when required to support critical customer issues or business continuity across time zones.