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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Customer Support Manager

💰 $ - $

Customer ServiceSupport OperationsManagement

🎯 Role Definition

The Customer Support Manager is responsible for leading and scaling a high-performing customer support organization that delivers excellent customer experiences across channels (email, phone, chat, social, and self-service). This role owns day-to-day operations, staffing, coaching, SLA adherence, reporting, and cross-functional escalation to reduce churn, improve CSAT/NPS, and drive continuous improvement in support processes and tooling.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Customer Support Representative / Team Lead
  • Customer Success Manager
  • Call Center Supervisor

Advancement To:

  • Head of Support / Director of Customer Support
  • Head of Customer Operations / VP of Customer Experience

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Operations Manager
  • Customer Success Director
  • Operations or Quality Assurance Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own the end-to-end operational delivery of customer support services, including setting and enforcing SLAs, monitoring KPIs (CSAT, NPS, First Response Time, Resolution Time, FCR, AHT), and ensuring consistent high-quality responses across channels.
  • Hire, onboard, mentor, and develop a geographically distributed team of support agents and team leads, establishing career paths, running regular 1:1s, and conducting performance reviews and calibration sessions.
  • Design, document, and maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs), escalation matrices, and knowledge base content to reduce resolution time and increase self-service adoption.
  • Lead workforce planning and scheduling to align staffing levels with demand forecasts, seasonal variations, and business initiatives, while optimizing for cost-efficiency and coverage across time zones.
  • Implement and manage ticketing and CRM systems (e.g., Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Intercom), including workflow automation, macros, tags, routing rules, SLAs, and integrations with product and billing systems.
  • Monitor and analyze support metrics and trends using dashboards and BI tools, producing weekly/monthly reports for leadership that highlight root causes, recurring issues, and actionable recommendations to reduce ticket volume.
  • Act as primary escalation point for complex, high-priority, and VIP customer issues; coordinate cross-functional responses with Product, Engineering, Sales, and Legal to ensure timely resolution and clear customer communication.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce friction in the customer journey: lead post-incident reviews, identify process gaps, and implement corrective actions that measurably improve CSAT and lower churn.
  • Partner with Product and Engineering to triage bugs, prioritize product improvements based on customer impact, and provide voice-of-customer insights into the roadmap and release plans.
  • Build and manage a knowledge management strategy: create, maintain, and measure the effectiveness of help center articles, troubleshooting guides, templates, and training resources to increase deflection and first-contact resolution.
  • Define and run quality assurance programs, including QA scoring frameworks, call/chat reviews, calibration sessions, and coaching plans to raise service standards and ensure policy compliance.
  • Develop and execute customer feedback programs (surveys, NPS follow-up, voice-of-customer panels) to capture sentiment, identify systemic issues, and measure the impact of support initiatives on retention and upsell opportunities.
  • Lead change management for support-related projects, including migration to new tools, rollout of new processes, or updates to billing/refund policies; ensure minimal disruption and clear team communication.
  • Manage support-related budgets, headcount planning, vendor relationships (outsourcing partners, telephony, AI/chatbot vendors), and procurement decisions to scale operations efficiently.
  • Implement automation and AI-assisted tools (chatbots, AI reply suggestions, routing optimizations) while maintaining quality and human oversight to reduce workload and speed up responses.
  • Create and administer onboarding and continuous training programs to keep support staff current on product updates, compliance requirements, and customer empathy practices.
  • Collaborate with Sales and Customer Success to create SLAs for enterprise customers, coordinate onboarding support, and ensure smooth handoffs between pre- and post-sales teams.
  • Maintain and improve security, privacy, and compliance practices in support interactions, including data handling, ticket redaction, PCI/PHI considerations, and GDPR/CCPA responsibilities.
  • Run incident response for service outages impacting customers: own customer-facing communications, internal coordination, RCA follow-ups, and preventive action plans to regain trust quickly.
  • Forecast and present support performance and resource needs to executive leadership, building business cases for headcount, tool investments, and process changes tied to measurable outcomes.
  • Champion a culture of customer obsession and measurable service excellence across the organization, driving initiatives that align support outcomes with company growth metrics.
  • Lead cross-functional projects to enhance self-service, product documentation, and onboarding flows that proactively reduce support volume and improve time-to-value for customers.

Secondary Functions

  • Participate in product go-to-market planning to ensure support readiness for new features, pricing changes, and promotions.
  • Provide subject matter expertise on support workflows during contract negotiations and enterprise renewals.
  • Assist sales and account teams with high-touch escalations and executive-level support to protect strategic accounts.
  • Support knowledge transfer and training for temporary or outsourced support partners to ensure consistent brand experience.
  • Contribute to recruitment efforts and employer branding to attract top support talent.
  • Evaluate and pilot new customer support tools, chat platforms, and workforce management solutions.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficiency with customer support platforms: Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Freshdesk, Intercom, or Help Scout.
  • Experience configuring ticket workflows, SLA rules, automation triggers, macros, and multi-brand routing.
  • Strong data literacy: ability to build and interpret dashboards in Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or built-in reporting; comfortable with SQL for ad-hoc queries.
  • Familiarity with CRM systems (Salesforce, HubSpot) and integrations between CRM, billing, and support systems.
  • Workforce management and forecasting experience using tools like NICE, Teleopti, or in-house models.
  • Knowledge of QA frameworks and scorecards for evaluating agent performance and coaching effectiveness.
  • Experience implementing chatbots and AI-assisted response tools, with an understanding of LLM prompt tuning for support use cases.
  • Understanding of customer experience metrics and analytics: CSAT, NPS, CES, FCR, AHT, SLA compliance.
  • Basic knowledge of GDPR, CCPA, PCI and other relevant security/privacy regulations as applied to support operations.
  • Familiarity with project management tools (Jira, Asana, Trello) and Agile practices for cross-functional delivery.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional written and verbal communication skills for clear, empathetic customer interactions and concise executive reporting.
  • Strong leadership and people management: coaching, performance management, and talent development experience.
  • Strategic problem solving and root-cause analysis mindset to convert insight into scalable processes.
  • Customer empathy and advocacy — ability to represent the customer voice to Product and Engineering.
  • Conflict resolution and de-escalation skills to manage high-stakes customer situations calmly.
  • Stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration with Product, Sales, Engineering, and Finance.
  • Time management and prioritization skills in high-volume, fast-paced environments.
  • Data-driven decision making with a bias for measurable outcomes and continuous improvement.
  • Change management capability to lead tool migrations, process rollouts, and policy updates.
  • Coaching and teaching orientation to mentor agents and build training programs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Business, Communications, Hospitality, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Business Administration, Operations Management, or related field; certifications in customer experience or project management (e.g., PMP, Six Sigma) are advantageous.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Business Administration
  • Communication Studies
  • Information Systems
  • Hospitality Management
  • Psychology

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7+ years in customer support or service roles with 2+ years in a leadership or management position; experience scaling teams and systems in SaaS or technology companies preferred.

Preferred:

  • Proven track record reducing ticket volume via self-service, improving CSAT/NPS, and implementing automation or AI-driven support solutions; experience managing multi-channel support and distributed teams across time zones.
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