Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Customer Operations Coordinator

🎯 Role Definition

The Customer Operations Coordinator is a hands-on operations professional who ensures smooth day-to-day customer lifecycle execution — from onboarding and billing handoffs to issue resolution, escalation management, and process improvement. Working at the intersection of Customer Success, Support, and internal operations, the coordinator manages CRM records, monitors SLAs, produces operational reports, coordinates root-cause investigations, and implements scalable processes that reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction. This role requires a balance of technical aptitude (CRM, reporting, basic analytics), strong cross-functional communication, and a continuous-improvement mindset.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Customer Service Representative / Support Agent
Customer Success Associate / Account Coordinator
Operations Analyst / Program Coordinator

Advancement To:

Senior Customer Operations Coordinator
Customer Operations Manager / Team Lead
Customer Success Manager or Implementation Manager
Operations Manager (cross-functional operations)

Lateral Moves:

Implementation Specialist / Onboarding Manager
Account Manager / Client Success Manager
Project Coordinator / Program Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Manage end-to-end customer onboarding and implementation tasks, coordinating internal resources, tracking milestones in the CRM, and ensuring customers meet go-live timelines while proactively communicating status and risks to stakeholders.
Own day-to-day operational execution for assigned customer segments, including verification of account setup, entitlement checks, configuration validation, and coordination with technical teams to resolve setup blockers.
Triage and manage incoming customer issues and escalations through ticketing systems (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud), ensuring timely categorization, SLA adherence, priority routing, and proactive customer updates until resolution.
Monitor and report on key operational metrics such as SLA compliance, time-to-resolution, onboarding completion rates, customer health indicators, and recurring issues; prepare weekly and monthly dashboards for leadership.
Perform root cause analysis on recurring support trends and operational failures, partner with Product and Engineering to create remediation plans, and track implementation of fixes to prevent recurrence.
Maintain and continuously improve standard operating procedures (SOPs), playbooks, and handoff checklists for onboarding, billing, and escalation processes to ensure consistent, scalable operations.
Coordinate billing, renewals, and entitlement reconciliations with Finance and RevOps teams, validating contract terms, invoice accuracy, and subscription changes to prevent revenue leakage.
Build, maintain, and audit CRM data integrity (accounts, contacts, activity history, contracts), and implement data hygiene processes to support accurate reporting and automation.
Lead recurring operational reviews and cross-functional stand-ups with Customer Success, Support, Product, and Sales to align priorities, surface blockers, and accelerate issue resolution.
Execute process improvement initiatives using lean principles and data-driven recommendations, including workflow automation using tools like Zapier, Salesforce Flow, or native CRM automations to reduce manual work.
Manage and execute customer communications during incidents, outages, and scheduled maintenance by coordinating content, timing, and stakeholder approvals to mitigate impact and maintain trust.
Train and onboard new operations and customer-facing staff on tools, SOPs, escalation paths, and best practices; create training materials and run regular refresher sessions to maintain team competency.
Serve as the escalation point for high-severity customer tickets, pairing with subject matter experts and management to drive rapid resolution and post-incident reviews with actionable follow-ups.
Conduct quality assurance audits on support tickets, onboard tasks, and CS handoffs to ensure SLAs, KPIs, and operational standards are met; provide coaching and feedback to improve quality.
Support customer lifecycle activities such as churn risk identification, advocacy escalations, product feedback capture, and handoffs to renewal/expansion teams to help drive retention.
Manage vendor and partner relationships that support customer operations (e.g., implementation partners, third-party integrators), coordinating scopes of work, SLAs, and performance reviews.
Build and maintain an up-to-date internal knowledge base and FAQ content for common operational flows, troubleshooting steps, and customer-facing guidance to improve first-contact resolution.
Participate in product release readiness by validating release notes, coordinating pre-release customer communication, and updating internal procedures and support scripts for new functionality.
Reconcile customer usage and operational metrics with product telemetry and billing systems to identify billing discrepancies, usage anomalies, and opportunities for upsell or cost optimization.
Facilitate cross-functional projects to implement new systems or scale processes (CRM migrations, ticketing improvements, reporting rollouts), manage project timelines, and track adoption metrics.
Escalate, document, and follow up on compliance, security, or contractual issues impacting customers, working with Legal, Security, and Compliance teams to remediate and communicate outcomes.
Drive continuous customer feedback programs by collecting structured input from operations touchpoints, synthesizing insights, and prioritizing operational or product changes that improve the customer experience.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Assist with periodic forecasting and capacity planning to ensure the operations team can meet service levels during peak demand.
Provide backup coverage for related roles (e.g., Coordinator coverage for tier-1 support during leave or volume surges).
Help facilitate customer advisory sessions and feedback loops to capture operational pain points and prioritize fixes.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

CRM proficiency: hands-on experience using and configuring Salesforce (Sales Cloud), HubSpot, or similar systems to manage accounts, tasks, and automation.
Ticketing and support tools: experience with Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, or similar platforms to triage, escalate, and report on customer issues.
Operational reporting & dashboards: advanced Excel / Google Sheets skills including VLOOKUP, pivot tables, and formulas; familiarity with BI tools such as Tableau, Looker, Power BI for building executive dashboards.
Basic SQL or familiarity with querying data warehouses to extract customer metrics, join datasets, and validate operational reports.
Workflow automation & no-code tools: experience using Salesforce Flow, Zapier, Workato, or similar to automate repetitive processes and handoffs.
SLA and performance management: track and enforce SLAs, create escalation matrices, and implement corrective actions to remediate SLA breaches.
Process documentation: ability to author SOPs, runbooks, playbooks, onboarding checklists, and training materials.
Data integrity and reconciliation: experience with billing reconciliation, entitlement verification, and ensuring data quality across systems.
Project coordination tools: proficient with collaboration tools such as Jira, Asana, Trello, or Confluence to manage tasks and cross-functional projects.
Familiarity with customer lifecycle tools: experience with customer success platforms like Gainsight, Totango, or ChurnZero is a plus.
Basic knowledge of subscription billing and contract management processes and integration points between CRM and billing systems.
Incident management: experience participating in incident response, building postmortems, and driving corrective actions.

Soft Skills

Exceptional verbal and written communication — able to translate technical details into clear customer-facing messages and internal updates.
Strong problem-solving and analytical mindset with an ability to synthesize root causes from disparate data sources.
Customer empathy and service orientation — focus on delivering a calming, solutions-driven experience during escalations.
Stakeholder management and collaboration — comfortable working cross-functionally with Sales, Product, Engineering, Finance, and Support.
Time management and prioritization — able to manage competing deadlines, high volumes of requests, and urgent escalations.
Attention to detail and accuracy when auditing accounts, reporting metrics, and handling billing reconciliations.
Adaptability and continuous learning — comfortable in fast-paced environments with evolving processes and tools.
Initiative and ownership — proactively identify process gaps and lead small-scale improvement projects to completion.
Coaching and knowledge sharing — ability to train peers and scale best practices across the operations team.
Conflict resolution and negotiation — manage difficult conversations with customers and internal partners to arrive at acceptable solutions.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Associate degree or equivalent work experience in a related field; high-performing candidates with relevant experience may be considered without a degree.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor's degree (BA/BS) in Business Administration, Operations Management, Communications, Information Systems, or a related discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Business Administration
Operations / Supply Chain / Program Management
Information Systems / Data Analytics
Communications / Customer Experience

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 1–4 years of experience in customer operations, customer success, technical support, onboarding, or operations coordination.

Preferred: 2–4 years of progressive experience managing customer-facing operations, CRM administration (Salesforce or similar), SLA-driven support environments, and cross-functional project coordination. Prior experience in SaaS or subscription businesses, billing reconciliation, and process improvement initiatives is highly desirable.