Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Customer Operations Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Customer Operations Manager is responsible for designing, executing and continuously improving the end-to-end processes that deliver a world-class customer experience. This role owns operational metrics and SLAs, manages cross-functional relationships between customer support, success, product and engineering, and applies data-driven decision making to scale support workflows, optimize cost-to-serve, and reduce churn. The ideal candidate blends hands-on day-to-day operations management (ticket routing, escalations, quality assurance) with strategic process design (automation, workforce planning, KPI frameworks) and strong stakeholder communication.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Customer Support Lead / Team Lead — with 3–5 years managing day-to-day support operations.
Operations Analyst or Business Operations Manager — with experience in process optimization and reporting.
Customer Success Manager or Account Manager — with deep customer-facing and retention experience.

Advancement To:

Director of Customer Operations — responsible for multi-site or global customer operations.
Head of Customer Experience / VP of Customer Experience — leading strategy across support, success, and CX.
Senior Program Manager, Global Operations — leading large transformation programs and cross-functional operations.

Lateral Moves:

Customer Success Leadership (e.g., Senior Customer Success Manager)
Product Operations Manager
Workforce Management or Contact Center Operations Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Own end-to-end customer operations for assigned channels (email, phone, chat, self-service), including setting and enforcing SLAs, tracking ticket lifecycle metrics, and reporting weekly and monthly performance to leadership to drive continuous improvement.
Design, implement, and scale standardized operational processes such as ticket triage, routing rules, escalation matrices, and handoffs between support, product and engineering to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and improve first-contact resolution (FCR).
Lead cross-functional initiatives to improve customer experience metrics (CSAT, NPS), partner with Product to prioritize bug fixes and product improvements based on operational data and recurring customer issues.
Create and manage dashboards and KPI frameworks in BI/analytics tools (Looker, Tableau, Power BI) to provide real-time visibility into volume trends, backlog, agent productivity, and root-cause analysis for leadership and stakeholders.
Manage workforce planning and scheduling for the customer operations team, forecasting volume, capacity and headcount needs, optimizing agent utilization while maintaining coverage for peak demand and SLA adherence.
Implement quality assurance and coaching programs, including call/chat/email quality scoring, targeted agent coaching, and knowledge-base contribution tracking to uplift overall service quality.
Own incident and escalation management processes for high-impact customer issues, coordinate cross-functional response (Support, Product, Engineering, Legal), and lead post-incident reviews to implement permanent fixes and reduce recurrence.
Drive automation and self-service adoption by identifying repeatable tasks for automation, overseeing the implementation of bots/workflows (Zendesk macros, Salesforce Flow, RPA), and tracking reduction in manual touches and cost-to-serve.
Manage vendor and third-party relationships for outsourced support, escalation routing, or workforce augmentation; negotiate SLAs, monitor vendor performance, and integrate vendor reporting into internal dashboards.
Develop, maintain and enforce operational documentation, runbooks and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to ensure consistent service delivery and rapid onboarding for new hires.
Lead onboarding and training programs for new operations hires, including curriculum design, performance milestones, and certification to accelerate time-to-productivity and ensure compliance with quality standards.
Partner with Legal, Security and Compliance teams to ensure customer operations adhere to regulatory, privacy and security requirements (GDPR, SOC 2) and to manage data handling practices across support channels.
Establish pricing and cost-to-serve analysis for key customer segments and recommend operational adjustments to improve unit economics and reduce escalations from high-cost support tiers.
Execute A/B tests and operational experiments (e.g., different routing logic, message templates, SLA windows) to validate improvements and iterate on processes using statistically significant results.
Serve as the voice of operations in product planning and roadmap discussions, representing common customer pain points, workflow constraints and opportunities to increase automation and reliability.
Drive customer onboarding and go-live support playbooks for strategic accounts to ensure successful product adoption, mitigate early churn risk and create repeatable onboarding methodologies.
Coordinate cross-functional release readiness reviews to align support documentation, agent training, escalation contacts and monitoring thresholds prior to new feature launches or platform changes.
Lead continuous improvement projects using Lean, Six Sigma or Kaizen methodologies to reduce cycle time, elimination of waste, and improve process consistency across global operations.
Manage monthly and quarterly operational budgeting for the customer operations function, tracking variance to plan and partnering with finance to forecast headcount and tooling needs.
Recruit, coach and retain high-performing operations teams, run performance reviews, set development plans and create career ladders within customer operations to sustain engagement and institutional knowledge.
Maintain and optimize the knowledge base and self-service resources (FAQs, help center, in-product help) to reduce inbound volume and improve customer DIY success rates.
Create and deliver executive-level reporting and presentations that translate operational metrics into business impact, trend analysis, and prioritized action plans for leadership investment.
Drive cross-functional communication cadences (daily standups, weekly ops reviews, monthly business reviews) to ensure alignment between support, success, product and engineering on priorities and risks.
Monitor and improve channel-specific metrics (chat speed, phone abandon rate, email backlog) through targeted process changes and agent enablement to achieve service level objectives.

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.
Maintain a living repository of playbooks and escalation contact lists for on-call rotations and out-of-hours incidents.
Run customer operations retrospectives and share learnings across regions to replicate successful playbooks and avoid duplicate mistakes.
Coordinate with marketing and product marketing on messaging during outages, planned maintenance, or product changes to reduce inbound confusion and volume.
Support strategic pilot programs for new support channels (social, in-product chat, community moderation) and assess operational readiness and ROI.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proven experience operating CRM and ticketing platforms (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Freshdesk) with the ability to configure workflows, macros and automation rules.
Strong analytics and reporting skills using SQL and BI tools (Looker, Tableau, Power BI) to build dashboards, run cohort analyses and surface operational insights.
Familiarity with workforce management and forecasting tools or techniques to model staffing needs and schedule agents to meet SLA targets.
Experience designing and implementing automation using chatbots, RPA tools or native platform automations (e.g., Zendesk Triggers, Salesforce Flow).
Proficiency with Excel/Google Sheets for ad-hoc analysis, pivot tables, VLOOKUP/INDEX-MATCH and scenario modeling.
Knowledge of incident management and on-call tooling (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) and practices to coordinate cross-functional responses.
Understanding of product release management and ability to coordinate readiness for support teams (release notes, training materials, escalation paths).
Exposure to quality assurance frameworks and quality scoring methodologies for support interactions.
Familiarity with data privacy and compliance requirements relevant to customer support (GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2).
Experience managing vendor relationships and negotiating SLAs for outsourced support or contact centers.
Basic understanding of API-driven integrations (webhooks, REST APIs) to enable automation and data syncs between CRM, product and analytics stacks.
Comfortable with project management tools and methodologies (JIRA, Asana, Trello; Agile or Waterfall).

Soft Skills

Strong cross-functional leadership and stakeholder management — able to influence Product, Engineering, and Finance without direct authority.
Exceptional written and verbal communication; experienced in creating executive summaries and operational playbooks.
Data-driven mindset with rigorous attention to metrics, root-cause analysis and continuous improvement.
Customer-centric orientation with empathy for end-user experience and an ability to translate feedback into actionable improvements.
Coaching and people management skills — building high-performing teams through feedback, development plans and recognition.
Prioritization and decision-making under pressure, especially during incidents and high-volume periods.
Strategic thinking balanced with bias for action and operational rigor to execute repeatable processes at scale.
Problem solving with structured approaches (5 Whys, RCA) and comfort running experiments to test fixes.
Adaptability and resilience in fast-paced, ambiguous environments with frequent product changes.
Attention to detail for maintaining SOPs, compliance documentation and accurate reporting.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Operations Management, Management Information Systems, or related field — or equivalent practical experience in customer operations.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s degree plus certifications in Lean, Six Sigma, Project Management (PMP) or Workforce Management.
MBA or Master’s degree in Operations, Business Analytics, or related discipline (preferred for senior roles).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Business Administration
Operations Management
Information Systems / Data Analytics
Communications / Organizational Leadership

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

5–8+ years in customer support/operations, contact center management, or customer success with at least 2 years in a manager-level role.

Preferred:

7–10 years operating customer-facing teams in SaaS, e-commerce, fintech or similar high-growth environments.
Demonstrated track record of reducing operational cost-to-serve, improving CSAT/NPS, scaling support systems and leading cross-functional initiatives.