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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Client Support Manager

💰 $ - $

Customer SupportCustomer SuccessManagementSaaS

🎯 Role Definition

As a Client Support Manager, you lead and mentor a team of client-facing support professionals to deliver exceptional customer experiences, resolve escalations efficiently, and drive continuous improvement across support operations. This role blends people management, operational ownership, cross-functional partnership, and metrics-driven decision making to reduce churn, increase NPS, and ensure compliance with SLAs in fast-paced SaaS and B2B businesses.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Customer Support Specialist or Support Team Lead
  • Customer Success Manager or Account Manager
  • Technical Support Engineer with leadership aspirations

Advancement To:

  • Head of Customer Support / Support Director
  • Director of Customer Success
  • VP of Customer Experience or Chief Customer Officer

Lateral Moves:

  • Implementation / Onboarding Manager
  • Account Management / Strategic Customer Manager
  • Product Manager (working on customer-facing features)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead, coach and develop a team of support agents and team leads, setting clear performance expectations, delivering regular 1:1s, career development plans, and conducting performance reviews to improve retention and team capability.
  • Own day-to-day support operations including queue management, workload balancing, shift scheduling, and staffing forecasts to meet SLAs and peak demand without compromising quality.
  • Define, monitor and report key support metrics (CSAT, NPS, FCR, MTTR, SLA compliance, ticket volume, backlog, churn impact) to senior leadership and use insights to drive continuous improvements.
  • Design and enforce escalation policies and workflows to ensure rapid resolution of high-priority client issues and a consistent handoff to engineering, product, or account teams.
  • Drive cross-functional collaboration with Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success to prioritize customer-impacting defects, feature requests, and process improvements.
  • Manage major incident response and post-mortem processes by coordinating internal stakeholders, communicating timely updates to affected clients, and implementing corrective actions to prevent recurrence.
  • Create and maintain high-quality customer-facing knowledge base articles, FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and internal runbooks to boost self-service and agent efficiency.
  • Implement and optimize ticketing systems (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Freshdesk) and CRM integrations to improve case routing, automation, and reporting accuracy.
  • Lead continuous training and onboarding programs for new hires and existing staff to ensure up-to-date product knowledge and consistent service delivery.
  • Develop and run root cause analysis on recurring issues, propose product or process changes, and collaborate with Product Managers to implement solutions that reduce support volume.
  • Manage customer escalations personally when appropriate, acting as a trusted escalation contact for enterprise clients and ensuring timely, empathetic, and technically accurate responses.
  • Coordinate account-level support for strategic customers including SLA negotiation, customized support plans, and periodic business reviews to strengthen relationships and reduce churn.
  • Own the support budget, vendor relationships (outsourced support, tool subscriptions), and cost optimization initiatives while preserving service quality.
  • Establish and refine workflows for proactive support (health checks, onboarding outreach, renewal risk monitoring) to surface issues before they negatively affect customer outcomes.
  • Drive automation initiatives using macros, triggers, AI-assist tools, and orchestration platforms to reduce manual work, speed response times, and scale support with minimal headcount growth.
  • Ensure compliance with data protection, privacy, and security requirements in all client interactions and tooling, including handling of PII and escalation of security incidents.
  • Conduct regular voice-of-customer analysis by synthesizing feedback from tickets, surveys, and calls to inform product roadmap, documentation improvements, and company-wide priorities.
  • Build and maintain playbooks for cross-functional incident management, including communication templates, stakeholder lists, and SLA breach remediation plans.
  • Partner with Sales and Renewals to provide client health signals, risk assessments, and recommended interventions to preserve revenue and upsell opportunities.
  • Lead initiatives to measure and improve agent engagement, culture, and wellbeing, including feedback loops, recognition programs, and workload balance strategies.
  • Define and implement quality assurance and coaching programs that include ticket reviews, call monitoring, and personalized improvement plans.
  • Support internationalization of support operations by adapting coverage, documentation, and processes for multiple time zones and localized customer expectations.
  • Negotiate and manage enterprise SLAs, define service scopes, and implement escalation matrices to ensure contractual obligations are met.
  • Drive the adoption of feedback loops between support, product, and engineering to accelerate issue resolution, prioritize fixes by customer impact, and reduce repeat tickets.

Secondary Functions

  • Create onboarding and enablement materials for new product launches, ensuring support teams are prepared to respond to launch-related volume and inquiries.
  • Participate in product demos and cross-functional customer calls when technical context or support history is required to accelerate resolution.
  • Support ad-hoc analytics and reporting requests to evaluate support program performance, staffing needs, and the ROI of automation tools.
  • Contribute to the customer success strategy by sharing trend analysis, churn drivers, and opportunities to improve lifecycle touchpoints.
  • Maintain relationships with 3rd-party support vendors and partners, coordinating integration points and SLAs as part of the broader support ecosystem.
  • Represent the support organization in quarterly business reviews and strategic planning sessions, aligning objectives to company growth targets.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficiency with enterprise ticketing and helpdesk platforms (Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Freshdesk, ServiceNow) and ability to configure workflows, triggers and macros.
  • Strong experience with CRM systems (Salesforce, HubSpot) and integrating support data to inform account health and renewal risk.
  • Data-driven reporting skills using BI tools or spreadsheets (Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Excel/Google Sheets) to build dashboards and extract insights from ticket data.
  • Familiarity with incident management and ITSM processes, including post-mortem facilitation and mitigation planning.
  • Basic technical literacy with SaaS architectures, APIs, logs, and common troubleshooting diagnostics to effectively support technical customer issues.
  • Experience implementing automation, chatbots, or AI-assisted support (e.g., conversational AI, workflow automation) to increase scale and reduce repetitive tasks.
  • Ability to design and maintain knowledge base platforms and content management for self-service success.
  • Budgeting and vendor management experience for tools, contractors, and outsourced support relationships.
  • Practical understanding of security and privacy best practices (GDPR, CCPA) as they relate to customer support workflows.
  • Familiarity with workforce management and forecasting tools to model staffing and coverage needs.

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership and people-management skills with a track record of coaching, mentoring, and growing high-performing teams.
  • Exceptional written and verbal communication with the ability to craft clear customer messages during escalations and to present metrics to executives.
  • High emotional intelligence and customer empathy to de-escalate complex client situations and preserve long-term relationships.
  • Problem-solving mindset with a bias for action, capable of converting root-cause analysis into scalable solutions.
  • Cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management to influence product and engineering priorities without direct authority.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance reactive ticket work with proactive improvements and strategic projects.
  • Conflict resolution and negotiation abilities for handling SLA disputes, enterprise escalations, and vendor issues.
  • Coaching and feedback delivery skills to develop agents through constructive, measurable improvement plans.
  • Adaptability and comfort in fast-changing, high-volume environments with competing priorities.
  • Strategic thinking to align support initiatives with broader company goals like retention, expansion, and customer advocacy.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience in a related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Communications, Information Technology, or related discipline. MBA or relevant advanced degree is a plus for senior roles.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Business Administration
  • Communications
  • Information Technology / Computer Science
  • Psychology (customer behavior)
  • Marketing / Customer Experience

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years in customer support, technical support, or customer success roles with at least 1–2 years of people management experience.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years in customer-facing support roles and 2+ years managing a support or client services team; experience in SaaS, B2B, or enterprise environments strongly preferred. Proven track record of improving support KPIs (CSAT, FCR, MTTR) and implementing tools/automation at scale.
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