Senior Customer Support Manager

Position Overview

The Senior Customer Support Manager is a senior-level player-coach leadership role responsible for both managing a portfolio of complex customer situations and leading a team of Customer Support Managers, Team Leads, and/or Support Specialists across multiple SaaS products.

This individual balances direct operational ownership with formal people leadership responsibilities. They remain actively engaged in high-priority customer work — including escalations, strategic accounts, sensitive communications, and complex support issues — while also driving team performance, coaching, operational consistency, and leadership development across the organization.

The Senior Support Manager serves as both an escalation leader and an operational example for the broader support organization. They are expected to model excellent customer communication, sound judgment, and strong cross-functional partnership while helping managers and specialists develop those same capabilities.

The ideal candidate brings significant experience supporting multiple B2B SaaS products, leading customer-facing teams, and managing executive-level customer escalations with professionalism, urgency, and accountability.

Key Responsibilities

• Carry direct responsibility for a portfolio of complex, high-priority, or escalated customer situations requiring senior-level ownership and coordination
• Lead and develop a team of Customer Support Managers, Team Leads, and/or Support Specialists with accountability for performance, coaching, and operational consistency
• Support customers across multiple SaaS products and environments, ensuring effective coordination and consistent service quality despite varying product complexity
• Serve as the senior escalation point for executive-level customer issues, commercially sensitive situations, and cross-functional incidents
• Draft, review, and guide high-impact customer communications during escalations, service disruptions, or critical account situations
• Balance personal operational responsibilities with leadership responsibilities — ensuring neither customer ownership nor people leadership quality degrades under pressure
• Coach managers and team members through complex customer interactions, escalation management, and stakeholder communication strategies using real-time operational examples
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Customer Success leadership to drive resolution plans, customer recovery efforts, and systemic operational improvements
• Maintain visibility into team performance metrics, SLA adherence, escalation trends, and support quality while actively contributing operationally where needed
• Help establish scalable operational processes, escalation frameworks, and communication standards across support teams and product lines
• Lead root cause analysis efforts to identify recurring issues, process gaps, product defects, and opportunities for operational improvement.
• Drive knowledge management strategy, including internal documentation, customer-facing knowledge bases, self-service adoption, and content governance.
• Define and enforce ticketing standards, case management processes, documentation requirements, escalation procedures, and support workflow compliance.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in customer support or technical support in a B2B SaaS environment
• Prior people management experience with direct reports in a support, customer success, or related customer-facing function — with formal accountability for individual performance and development
• Proven ability to develop support talent — identifying capability gaps, designing development plans, and delivering feedback that produces measurable improvement in individual performance
• Strong operational fluency — able to maintain visibility into a team’s queue health, SLA performance, and quality trends without managing the day-to-day triage directly
• Experience managing team performance across multiple levels of seniority — including both early-career and senior support specialists
• Demonstrated track record of driving support quality improvement at the team level — through case review programs, coaching, process design, or quality framework development
• History of cross-functional influence — representing the support team’s needs and performance in conversations with CS, Product, Engineering, and Leadership with specificity and credibility
• Experience with support tooling at both a practitioner and team management level – Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot, or TeamSupport — including data quality oversight and process compliance.
• Exceptional communication skills — able to deliver difficult feedback, manage executive escalations, and represent the team to senior leadership with equal directness and care
• Experience leading remote or distributed support teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a Support Team Lead or equivalent player-coach role prior to formal management — demonstrating natural progression through the support leadership career path
• Background building or redesigning support team structures, onboarding programs, quality frameworks, or career development pathways
• Experience designing or owning support performance reporting — dashboards, SLA tracking systems, CSAT reporting, and quality score frameworks that inform management decisions
• Familiarity with knowledge management strategy at the team level — including documentation quality governance, content coverage planning, and self-service optimization
• Thought leadership in support people management — performance calibration, talent development frameworks, or retention of high-performing support professionals
• Experience managing across multiple support channels or product lines simultaneously
• Certifications in customer support, ITIL, people management, or help desk operations are a plus