WHAT DOES A CUSTOMER OPERATIONS MANAGER DO?
Published: September 12, 2024 – The Customer Operations Manager administers and optimizes customer success software to support engagement, ensure data quality, and streamline processes. This role involves designing automation strategies to enhance visibility into risks and opportunities while maintaining technical documentation for automation and processes. The manager also evaluates tools, builds integrations, and delivers reports to demonstrate the value of customer operations initiatives.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Customer Operations Manager
1. Customer Operations Manager Details and Accountabilities
- Client Contact: First point of contact with the client during the period of service delivery.
- Program Organization: Organizing programs and activities in alignment with the mission and goals of the organization.
- Service Delivery: Guaranteeing uninterrupted delivery of services.
- Team Management: Managing a team with a diverse array of talents and responsibilities.
- Goal Achievement: Ensuring goals are met in areas including project GP, customer satisfaction, safety, quality, and team member performance.
- Project Changes: Implementing and managing changes and interventions to ensure project goals are achieved.
- Program Reporting: Producing accurate and timely reports of program status throughout its life cycle.
- Risk Analysis: Taking responsibility for analyzing program risks.
- Resource Leadership: Leading and managing resources (project managers).
- Team Training: Training the team for success.
- Service Responsibility: Responsible for phone and online chat service during work hours.
- Call Screening: Screening and assigning calls and messages.
- Customer Experience: Working directly with customers to create the best experience possible.
2. Customer Operations Manager Overview
- Customer Discussions: Talking directly with customers on key issues.
- Account Expansion: Establishing and expanding relationships with assigned key accounts to uncover additional opportunities.
- Pain Point Analysis: Rooting out customer pain points to optimize workflow for current and new customers' data-driven decisions.
- Team Collaboration: Collaborating with Growth and Strategy, Product Dev, and Engineering teams.
- Friction Reduction: Finding creative ways to reduce friction and make customer experience more seamless.
- Customer Influence: Maximizing exposure to the customer leadership team to influence and provide customer value.
- In-App Messaging: Experience with in-app messaging software and support platforms.
- Performance Review: Reviewing and analyzing performance against standards and preparing improvement plans.
- Team Organization: Ensuring (with HR Manager support) that the area of responsibility is properly organized, staffed, skilled, and directed.
- Coaching: Coaching, motivating, and developing direct and indirect subordinates within HR policies.
- Cross-Collaboration: Driving and ensuring know-how sharing and cross-collaboration.
- Impact Presentation: Presenting the commercial and customer experience impact and influencing the delivery of service improvements and root cause eradication.
- Resolution Coordination: Coordinating resolution actions across all required Gigaclear teams.
3. Customer Operations Manager Functions
- Support Strategy: Creates, implements, monitors, and reviews customer support strategy.
- Target Definition: Defines key targets and ensures these are achieved for customer support.
- Process Development: Develops, implements, and maintains customer support processes.
- Project Participation: Participates in customer support-related development projects.
- Configuration Tools: Creates configuration tools across multiple suppliers, products, and divisions.
- Customer Assistance: Ensures the resolution of customer issues by coordinating with Sales, Operations, Supply Chain Management, and other internal/external teams.
- Resolution Coordination: Coordinates resolution with After-Sales Service and/or Spare Parts teams.
- Quotations and Invoicing: Oversees price quotes to customers and ensures timely issuance of invoices for revenue generation.
- Credit Follow-Up: Identifies and closely follows up on customer issues relating to credit.
- Commercial Operations: Develops all commercial operations processes for doing business in the US, including quotations, orders, customer service, and invoicing for assembled equipment and multi-divisional projects.
- Solution Recommendations: Recommends appropriate solutions for special customer requests and coordinates with related teams to ensure complete handling of the request.
- Reporting and Statistics: Establishes regular reports and statistics for the customer support process.
4. Customer Operations Manager Job Summary
- Team Leadership: Lead the Onboarding and Customer Care teams to ensure a consistently premium service and experience for Gigaclear communities and customers.
- Team Scaling: Build and scale the team to meet the needs of growing communities and customers.
- Empowerment: Empower the teams to provide effective and informative answers that aim for a resolution at the first contact.
- Supplier Management: Manage third-party suppliers supporting the team, ensuring schedules reflect customer needs.
- Performance Management: Be responsible for performance management and ongoing training and development of the team.
- Culture Building: Drive a positive culture within the team, aligned with company values.
- Customer Advocacy: Act as the voice of the customer, ensuring all customer-impacting processes and communications meet their needs.
- Cross-Department Collaboration: Work collaboratively with departments (e.g., Networks, Billing, Sales Operations) to improve processes with a focus on customer experience.
- Root Cause Analysis: Analyze the root cause of highlighted issues and create a service improvement plan to mitigate and eradicate them.
- Process Improvement: Build and implement processes to simplify, automate, and reduce unnecessary workload.
- Performance Reporting: Report on performance against SLAs, KPIs, and NPS measures, along with volume, type, and cause of issues.
- Internal Engagement: Drive internal engagement within the team to ensure consistent and timely responses are provided.
5. Customer Operations Manager Details
- Software Administration: Administer, optimize, and configure Auvik's customer success software for all processes that support customer engagement and visibility.
- Data Integrity: Oversee data quality and identify integrity issues to ensure compliance with tracking and reporting processes.
- Automation Design: Design advanced automation strategies to enhance customer engagement, visibility into risks and opportunities, and optimize new and existing processes.
- Technical Documentation: Develop and maintain technical documentation and help-related materials across automated triggers, campaigns, and updates to existing processes.
- Tool Integration: Ensure that new tools and applications integrate seamlessly into the existing tech stack, building necessary components using native integrations or in-house middleware for accurate data flow.
- Quality Assurance: Play an integral role in the quality assurance process for all customer-facing campaigns, including end-to-end testing of emails and automation processes.
- Reporting: Build reporting for customer operations initiatives to demonstrate the value of the team's work.
- Tool Evaluation: Evaluate when existing tools are inappropriate for the jobs to be done and make recommendations for replacements.
- Process Improvement: Review existing processes and communications to identify improvements and reduce escalations.
- Performance Reporting: Share regular performance reports with key stakeholders, gaining internal buy-in to help drive improvement.
- Service Review: Perform regular internal service reviews to highlight causes within current processes.
- Data Governance: Establish data governance rules to ensure integrity.
- Tool Ownership: Serve as owner and admin of Technical Support tools (e.g. Zendesk).