Manager, Customer Advocacy

Job Description

Advocacy Manager

We are looking for an Advocate Manager to join our globally diverse and talented team. The manager will primarily be responsible for the growth and success of the Advocacy team by driving collaboration, culture, relationships, and professional development. You will help define regional methods of success towards global KPIs and communicate to staff and leadership on ongoing progress. In a fast-paced environment, you will be effective at managing change and initiating improvements while managing strategic and tactical responsibilities. 

You are able to understand the needs of the customer, anticipate their pain, advocate internally for solutions, and communicate effectively to deliver the best possible customer experience. You are the focal point of a global team to our customers… and a funnel for their input back to Zendesk. If you like setting a new standard, a challenge, and want to reinvent the standards of customer support… then we have a job for you!

Job Responsibilities

• Manage and coach a team of Advocates, supporting them and helping to remove roadblocks as needed.

• Coach Advocates to deliver on KPI/Metric targets while consistently developing new initiatives or iterating on existing processes to drive success. Coaching is 60% of the role.

• Expedite advanced customer issues, reduce first reply time and full resolution time, actively monitor and address all escalations as needed.

• Analyze long term trends and work with Managers on hitting key performance metric targets to ensure customer satisfaction.

• Manage team allocations, people expectations, and career development opportunities.

• Collaborate with senior leadership teams to proactively drive service improvements and manage projects.

• Consistently drive teams towards higher performance and quality expectations and champion a philosophy of continuous improvement.

• Communicate and work with a global peer group to maintain consistency in delivering the best experience for the customer.

• Hire and develop new Advocates.

• Partner with other departments to be the voice of the customer and provide continued pathways of communication for better escalations.

• Lead weekly team meetings to ensure team understanding of company initiatives.

• Be part of the escalation process to handle customer issues with the highest sense of urgency.

• Conduct QA evaluations and provide coaching feedback to team members. Remain calibrated with the Quality team and other managers.

• Drive product change and improvement through continuous feedback and exposure to projects that help make Zendesk the leading support platform.

• Liaise with internal departments and help them be successful in their roles to resolving customer issues.

• Be the first responders for all executive escalations related to Zendesk’s customer needs.

Desired Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent

• 2+ years experience supervising in a technical support operation

• Proven experience in mentoring and developing people and leaders

• Demonstrated expertise using metrics to drive process and quality

• Strong ability to build and maintain relationships at all levels

• A proven ability to influence, gain support where necessary and engage others remotely

• Clear customer focus, solution driven, and adaptable to rapidly changing priorities

• High degree of self-motivation and ability to work on own initiative

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

• Experience crafting, implementing, supporting, and solving issues in complex multi-vendor / multi-platform solutions

• Knowledge of HTML, XML, JavaScript or CSS Experience with RESTful API

• Experience resolving tickets in a SaaS environment

• Experience with customer support from an operations perspective

• Experience and understanding of customers use a multi-tenant SaaS / cloud provided software

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $83,000.00-$125,000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. Whi