Senior Support Operations Manager

Location: Remote (LATAM or South Africa strongly preferred)
Schedule: Flexible; overlap with U.S. Eastern Time required
Engagement: Full-time, Independent Contractor
Compensation: Competitive; pegged to experience (monthly USD)

About the Role

We’re hiring a hands-on Senior support operations manager to own our global support function end to end. You’ll lead a growing team, design processes, implement self-serve and AI-assisted support, and partner cross-functionally (Product, Engineering, Success, RevOps) to deliver fast, accurate, effortless resolutions at scale.

Core Outcomes (KPIs)

Reduce ticket backlog and maintain healthy work-in-progress limits (WIP).
Improve speed: Avg. First Response Time (FRT) and Avg. Time to Resolution (TTR) trending down month-over-month.
Increase quality: CSAT ≥ 90%, QA pass rate ≥ target, First Contact Resolution (FCR) ↑.
Deflection & efficiency: % self-service resolution (help center, in-app guides, chatbots) ↑; cost per ticket ↓.
Operational maturity: Robust playbooks, clear SLAs, accurate forecasting, and staffing models in place within 90 days.

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and scale a distributed support team (tiering, queues, scheduling, QA, coaching).
Establish SLAs/SLOs, escalation paths, incident communications, and problem management loops.
Own support tooling and automation strategy (help desk, live chat, IVR/call, RPA, AI copilot/chatbot, knowledge base).
Build a modern self-service motion (structured KB, release notes, how-to videos, in-app guides, status page).
Partner with Product/Eng to triage bugs, track known issues, and close the loop with customers.
Instrument reporting (executive dashboards) covering volume, backlog, aging, FRT/TTR, CSAT, FCR, deflection, QA.
Drive AI integration: triage routing, agent assist, macro generation, knowledge search/RAG, and summarization.
Collaborate with Customer Success on handoffs (expansion risks, health scores, VOC insights).
Workforce Management: shift planning for 24×5 (or 24×7 as needed), on-call rotation for incidents.

Ideal Experience

5–8+ years in B2B SaaS support; 2–3+ years managing multi-time-zone teams.
Built/owned support operations at scale (chat + email; phone a plus).
Strong command of metrics, queue design, and process standardization.
Proven record standing up self-service and AI/automation that measurably reduce handle time.
Excellent communication; crisp incident comms and executive-ready reporting.

Tools (examples)

Zendesk/Freshdesk/Intercom/Help Scout; Dialpad/Aircall; Guru/Confluence; Asana/Jira; Looker/Mode/Power BI; statuspage.io; QA tools (MaestroQA, Klaus); AI/LLM copilots, RAG search.

30/60/90 Plan

30 days: Audit team, queues, macros, and KB; baseline KPIs; publish interim SLA.
60 days: Ship revamped KB and chatbot intents; implement QA rubric; staff model; weekly exec dashboard.
90 days: Achieve targeted reductions in FRT/TTR/backlog; launch agent-assist copilot; finalize FY headcount & budget.

Sr Support Operations Manager - 15212