Job Summary:The
Manager, Customer Support leads the customer support team and is accountable for team performance, service delivery, and continuous improvement of support operations. This role translates department priorities into team goals, sets expectations, coaches and develops employees, and manages staffing and coverage to deliver consistent service from initial customer contact through resolution. The Manager uses support KPIs to identify performance gaps and drive improvements in service levels, workflows, and documentation. As the escalation owner for complex customer issues, the Manager guides resolution and engages directly when needed, while partnering with Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and Sales to address customer feedback and prepare the team for product changes.
Primary Responsibilities:- Provide direct people leadership for the customer support team, including setting goals and expectations, assigning work, conducting regular one-on-ones, coaching performance, and fostering an accountable, inclusive, high-performing culture.
- Manage key aspects of the employee lifecycle for the team, including participating in interviews and selection, supporting onboarding, providing ongoing coaching and development, completing performance reviews, recognizing contributions, and addressing performance concerns.
- Establish team priorities, service standards, and operating rhythms; translate department goals into clear individual and team deliverables and hold the team accountable for results.
- Manage team capacity and coverage through staffing plans, schedules, on-call rotations, and holiday coverage. Assess workload against available capacity, adjust assignments and coverage to maintain service levels, and identify staffing gaps requiring leadership decisions.
- Own team performance against support KPIs, including response time, customer satisfaction (CSAT), first-contact resolution (FCR), ticket backlog, and quality. Review trends, identify root causes of performance gaps, implement team-level improvement plans, and communicate results and progress against service expectations.
- Monitor queues and team capacity, make real-time prioritization and resource-allocation decisions, and ensure timely, effective resolution of support tickets across all levels.
- Own the escalation-management process for high-impact, complex, or at-risk customer cases. Establish clear resolution ownership, coordinate the appropriate resources, and ensure timely customer communication, follow-through, and documented resolution; engage directly when the issue requires managerial intervention.
- Serve as the team's technical and operational escalation point, guiding employees through ambiguous issues and determining when to involve Product, Engineering, Customer Success, or senior leadership.
- Lead support-operations improvements across processes, workflows, the knowledge base, quality assurance, and training. Prioritize opportunities using service data and customer feedback, guide implementation and team adoption, and evaluate whether changes improve efficiency, consistency, and scalability.
- Identify customer-risk patterns and partner with Customer Success and Sales on retention strategies and coordinated action plans.
- Represent the voice of the customer by synthesizing support trends and actionable feedback for Product, Engineering, Sales, and other stakeholders.
- Lead support-team readiness for new features and product changes by coordinating employee training, documentation updates, and escalation planning with cross-functional partners. Identify readiness gaps before launch and use post-launch feedback to address support issues and improve future rollouts.
Skills & Competencies:- Demonstrated people-leadership capability, including setting expectations, coaching employees, addressing performance concerns, developing talent, and creating accountability across a team.
- Sound judgment in balancing customer impact, employee capacity, service levels, and established business priorities in a fast-paced environment, including knowing when to escalate decisions or risks to senior leadership.
- Experience owning customer escalations with empathy, clarity, urgency, and disciplined follow-through.
- Demonstrated ownership of strategic support initiatives that improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, quality, and scalability.
- Ability to translate company objectives into measurable team goals, operating plans, and individual expectations.
- Strong analytical skills, including experience building or using dashboards, interpreting performance data, identifying root causes, and adjusting team priorities based on evidence.
- Excellent verbal and written communication, with the ability to tailor messaging for employees, customers, executives, and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Strong cross-functional influence, facilitation, conflict-resolution, and change-management skills across remote and in-person environments.
- Sufficient technical aptitude to troubleshoot foundational issues, assess risk, guide team members, and coordinate effective escalation paths.
Minimum Qualifications:- 4+ years of progressive experience in customer support, technical support, customer success, or a related software environment, including experience serving as a team lead, supervisor, or people manager.
- 1-2 years of experience leading or supervising employees, including accountability for team results, coaching and development, workload coordination, and performance feedback; experience supporting a customer or technical support team is preferred.
- Demonstrated experience conducting performance reviews, setting measurable expectations, providing documented feedback, addressing underperformance, and building development plans.
- Experience hiring, onboarding, and retaining employees and building inclusive, collaborative team cultures.
- Experience monitoring team KPIs, service-level performance, ticket queues, or team capacity and using available data to support improvement plans.
- Strong process-oriented mindset with a track record of building and optimizing workflows, support documentation, quality practices, and training programs.
- Experience leading escalations and partnering cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Customer Success, or Sales to resolve customer and operational issues.
- Familiarity with support tools such as Zoho Desk, Salesforce, or comparable ticketing and customer-management platforms.
- Experience supporting software systems; experience in SaaS, point-of-sale, hospitality technology, or another operationally complex customer environment is preferred.
Salary range: $81,000 - $88,500 USD 
