The Manager, Workforce Management & Escalations serves as the operational owner for workforce planning, queue performance, and escalation management across Dobson's Care organization. This role leads forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and vendor-overflow visibility while also managing a small team responsible for escalated customer issues and high-priority queue interventions.
This is a bridge role between front-line operations, leadership, and support partners. The right person brings strong workforce management discipline, creates structure around queue ownership, and establishes clear accountability for how escalations are triaged, worked, and resolved.
Key responsibilities- Serve as the primary owner of workforce management for the Care organization, including forecasting, staffing plans, scheduling, intraday management, and queue performance oversight.
- Build and maintain a workforce planning rhythm that improves visibility into demand, staffing gaps, service levels, and overflow risk.
- Monitor queue performance in real time and make adjustments to staffing plans, priorities, and workflows to protect customer experience and operational targets.
- Manage a small team of Escalations/WFM Specialists responsible for triaging, coordinating, and helping drive resolution of high-priority customer issues.
- Establish and enforce a clear escalation framework, including intake paths, severity definitions, response expectations, ownership, and communication standards.
- Partner with operations leaders to reduce the need for outside vendor overflow by improving staffing discipline, queue management, and proactive planning.
- Provide visibility into outsourced queue performance and help determine what volume should or should not be routed externally, even where direct control of vendor staffing remains limited.
- Create/Refine scorecards, reporting, and performance reviews that drive accountability across in-house teams and external partners.
- Identify root causes behind repeat escalations, queue instability, and service-level misses, and translate those insights into process, staffing, training, or workflow improvements.
- Support expansion into digital channels such as chat and email by building a workforce and escalation framework that can scale across voice and non-voice work.
- Build a high-performance culture with strong leadership, accountability, and cross-functional coordination.
First-year priorities- Establish a reliable WFM operating cadence for forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and performance review.
- Create visibility into queue conditions, volume trends, staffing gaps, and overflow drivers so leaders can make faster and better decisions.
- Stand up a formal escalation intake and triage process with clear service expectations, ownership, and follow-through.
- Reduce the number of escalations sitting without response and improve consistency in how urgent customer issues are handled.
- Implement scorecards and reporting that create accountability across internal teams and outsourced partners.
- Build a scalable operating model that supports future chat and email channels in addition to voice.
Ideal candidate profile- 5+ years of workforce management experience in a contact center, customer care, or service-heavy environment.
- 2+ years of people leadership experience, ideally leading analysts, real-time teams, or specialized operational support functions.
- Strong working knowledge of forecasting, scheduling, queue management, intraday execution, and service-level performance.
- Experience partnering closely with front-line operations leaders and influencing staffing and performance decisions.
- Exposure to escalation management, incident coordination, or high-priority customer issue resolution in a live operations environment.
- Comfort working with data, scorecards, and operational reporting to drive accountability and decision-making.
- Comfortable operating in a growing, evolving environment where processes, tools, and ownership models may still be maturing.
Leadership style and culture fit- Hands-on, sleeves-rolled-up leader who is comfortable working in the details while building longer-term process discipline.
- Strong operator who brings structure, urgency, and calm to fast-moving queue and escalation issues.
- Clear communicator who can align front-line leaders, cross-functional partners, and external vendors around priorities and expectations.
- Builder mindset with a focus on creating sustainable processes, not just reacting to daily fire drills.
Work locationThis role may be remote or based in a hybrid model, depending on business need.
