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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Customer Operations Specialist

💰 $45,000 - $70,000

Customer OperationsCustomer SupportOperationsCustomer Success

🎯 Role Definition

The Customer Operations Specialist is responsible for ensuring smooth, efficient, and consistent customer-facing operational processes across order management, billing, returns, escalations, and service delivery. This role acts as the operational backbone of the customer lifecycle — resolving complex issues, implementing process improvements that reduce friction and cost, owning KPIs and operational SLAs, and partnering cross-functionally with Sales, Finance, Product, and Engineering to deliver excellent customer outcomes. The ideal candidate is highly organized, data-driven, experienced with CRM and ticketing systems, and skilled at translating customer feedback into repeatable operational improvements.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Customer Service Representative
  • Operations Associate / Coordinator
  • Billing or Order Management Specialist

Advancement To:

  • Senior Customer Operations Specialist
  • Customer Operations Manager / Team Lead
  • Manager of Customer Success Operations
  • Director of Customer Operations

Lateral Moves:

  • Customer Success Manager
  • Account Manager / Client Success
  • Implementation / Onboarding Specialist
  • Business Operations Analyst

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own end-to-end order lifecycle management including order entry, order validation, coordination with fulfillment, monitoring delivery status, and escalation to internal teams for exceptions to ensure on-time delivery and customer satisfaction.
  • Manage and resolve complex customer escalations by diagnosing root causes, coordinating cross-functional remediation (Sales, Product, Logistics, Finance), and communicating clear mitigation plans and timelines to customers and stakeholders.
  • Serve as the primary operational point of contact for B2B and/or B2C accounts, maintaining consistent communication for status updates, contractual changes, renewals, and service interruptions while adhering to SLA commitments.
  • Execute billing and invoicing operations including invoice generation, dispute resolution, credit/debit memos, payment reconciliation, and coordination with Finance to reduce DSO and prevent revenue leakage.
  • Triage and process inbound tickets from CRM/ticketing platforms (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud) within defined SLAs, including categorization, root-cause tagging, escalation routing, and timely resolution.
  • Maintain and optimize CRM and operational workflows by configuring automations, managing data integrity, updating knowledge base articles, and training team members on best practices to improve first contact resolution (FCR).
  • Produce timely operational reports and dashboards (daily, weekly, monthly) tracking KPIs such as SLA compliance, ticket volume, resolution time, churn risk indicators, fulfillment accuracy, and NPS/CSAT trends; present insights to leadership and recommend actions.
  • Lead continuous process improvement initiatives using data-driven approaches (Lean, Kaizen, Six Sigma principles) to reduce manual work, shorten cycle times, and increase accuracy across customer operations.
  • Coordinate product or service implementation activities (onboarding) including milestone tracking, handoffs between Sales and Customer Success, configuration validation, and readiness checks to ensure successful go-live.
  • Manage refunds, returns and warranty claims processes, working with Logistics and Quality teams to investigate issues, authorize appropriate remedies, and maintain compliance with company policy and regulatory requirements.
  • Monitor and improve quality assurance for operational outputs by conducting regular audits of order entries, ticket responses, billing transactions, and escalations to minimize errors and rework.
  • Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to triage reproducible customer issues, document steps to reproduce, prioritize operational-impacting bugs, and validate fixes before release to production.
  • Act as program manager for special projects such as new product launches, system migrations (e.g., CRM or billing platform), and cross-functional change initiatives, ensuring scope, timelines, stakeholder alignment, and risk mitigation.
  • Implement and manage SLA and escalation policies, maintaining clear documentation, training materials, and reporting so customers and internal teams have predictable response and resolution expectations.
  • Serve as the subject matter expert for operating procedures, policy updates, and compliance requirements, ensuring the team adheres to contractual obligations and regulatory standards (privacy, data protection, industry-specific rules).
  • Conduct root cause analysis for recurring operational failures, synthesize findings into executive summaries, and drive remediation plans with measurable milestones and owners.
  • Maintain up-to-date customer records and operational data hygiene in CRM and order management systems to enable accurate reporting, forecasting, and a single source of customer truth.
  • Negotiate and coordinate with external vendors and 3PL partners to resolve fulfillment or service delivery issues, track performance against SLAs, and optimize vendor terms to lower operational cost.
  • Proactively identify at-risk customers through data signals (usage declines, unresolved tickets, billing disputes) and partner with Customer Success and Sales to run retention or escalation campaigns.
  • Design and deliver operational training sessions, onboarding documentation, and playbooks for new hires and internal partners to ensure consistent execution of customer-facing processes.
  • Oversee renewals handoffs and operational checks to confirm contract terms, billing rates, and service entitlements are correctly reflected in customer accounts prior to renewal or upsell activity.
  • Support pricing and contract administration activity by validating order configurations against approved pricing, discount rules, and special contract terms to prevent margin erosion.
  • Maintain confidentiality and compliance with security policies while handling sensitive customer data, PCI-related payment information, and internal financial records.
  • Facilitate cross-functional weekly operational reviews highlighting top risk accounts, open escalations, SLA breaches, and system health metrics, driving accountability and timely resolution.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc cross-functional projects such as market expansions, large-scale migrations, and compliance audits by providing operational expertise, data exports, and stakeholder coordination.
  • Contribute to continuous improvement of the knowledge base and self-service resources by writing clear, customer-facing articles and internal SOPs to reduce ticket volume and increase self-resolution.
  • Assist Product and Engineering teams with acceptance testing for operational workflows to ensure new releases do not regress customer-facing processes.
  • Provide on-call operational support coverage during critical incidents, coordinate incident communications across teams, and perform post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence.
  • Perform periodic data cleansing and deduplication tasks to ensure operational systems and analytics pipelines reflect accurate customer information.
  • Coordinate with Finance on month-end and quarter-end reconciliations, disputed invoices, and close-support for revenue recognition queries.
  • Participate in customer calls for escalated technical or billing issues, documenting action items, follow-ups, and confirming closure to the customer and internal stakeholders.
  • Help design and implement SLA automation and escalation rules in CRM, reducing manual follow-ups and ensuring consistent routing and prioritization.
  • Act as liaison between sales engineering and operations to ensure complex quotes are executable operationally and that orders are fulfilled as scoped.
  • Support product adoption efforts by tracking onboarding milestones and ensuring customers meet criteria for value realization and success metrics.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • CRM proficiency: deep, operational experience with Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, HubSpot, or equivalent enterprise CRM platforms.
  • Order management systems (OMS) and ERP familiarity: experience processing and reconciling orders in systems such as NetSuite, SAP, or custom OMS platforms.
  • Billing and invoicing platforms: hands-on with systems like Zuora, Stripe Billing, or billing modules of ERP systems; experience handling disputes and credits.
  • Ticketing and incident management: expertise creating workflows, macros, SLAs, and escalation rules in Zendesk, Freshdesk, or ServiceNow.
  • SQL and data querying: ability to write queries to extract customer data, generate reports, and perform root-cause analysis (basic to intermediate SQL).
  • Spreadsheet & reporting: advanced Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets skills (pivot tables, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, conditional logic) and familiarity with Looker, Tableau, or Power BI dashboards.
  • Analytics & KPI tracking: experience instrumenting and tracking KPIs like SLA compliance, CSAT/NPS, churn indicators, and operational throughput.
  • Process documentation and automation: experience using tools like Zapier, Workato, or platform-native automations to reduce manual steps.
  • Knowledge of GDPR, CCPA and data privacy basics as they relate to customer data handling and operational compliance.
  • Project management tools: comfortable using Jira, Asana, or Trello to manage operational projects and cross-functional initiatives.

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication with the ability to distill complex operational issues into clear status updates for customers and leadership.
  • Customer-centric mindset with empathy and the ability to maintain composure and professionalism under pressure.
  • Problem-solving and critical thinking: able to perform root cause analysis and propose systemic fixes rather than one-off solutions.
  • Attention to detail and high accuracy when processing orders, invoices, and contractual terms.
  • Cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management to drive action across Sales, Product, Finance, and Engineering.
  • Time management and prioritization skills for handling competing SLAs and high-volume operational queues.
  • Adaptability to changing processes, platform migrations, and scale as the company grows.
  • Leadership and influence without authority: ability to lead projects and process changes across distributed teams.
  • Continuous improvement orientation: comfortable using metrics to drive incremental operational gains.
  • Conflict resolution and negotiation skills for managing vendor contracts, customer disputes, and internal trade-offs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • High school diploma or equivalent (required)

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Operations Management, Communications, Finance, Information Systems, or related field (preferred)

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Business Administration
  • Operations Management
  • Supply Chain Management
  • Information Systems / Computer Science
  • Finance / Accounting
  • Communications

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–5 years of experience in customer operations, order management, billing operations, or customer support in a fast-paced environment.

Preferred:

  • 3+ years in a Customer Operations or Operations Specialist role supporting enterprise SaaS, e-commerce, or subscription-based businesses.
  • Demonstrated experience with enterprise CRM systems (Salesforce/Zendesk), billing platforms (Zuora/Stripe), and SQL-based reporting.
  • Prior exposure to cross-functional project leadership, system migrations, or process automation initiatives.
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