Director, Technical Support

About the role:

Are you a passionate and visionary support leader who thrives in a dynamic high-growth business? Are you a customer experience champion? Do you enjoy working in a highly technical environment? If so, we want you as the Director, Technical Support Engineering (Level 1) at Samsara. The Technical Support Engineering team is focused on making our customers successful by advocating on their behalf, resolving technical issues and challenges, and maintaining the high-quality, white-glove service they expect.

In this role, you will be responsible for delivering world-class 24x7, technical support experience to Samsara’s rapidly expanding mid-market and enterprise user-base, during a time of hyper growth. This position requires a unique combination of technical support understanding in SaaS and equipment expertise. While there is an existing team of ~40, most of the scaling of this function is still ahead.

As a leader of Technical Support Engineering reporting to the Vice President of Global Customer Support, you will grow, develop and motivate a team of technical experts and supervise day-to-day operations of your team. You will work across the Samsara solution set, working hand in hand with the broader Technical Support, Customer Success, Engineering, and Product Management teams. You will direct support teams organized by product specialty and focused on the fast resolution of complex technical issues. Your teams provide backline support to customers. You will handle escalations, work with our delivery partners and Samsara resources, track and facilitate follow-the-sun case handling and overall technical support day-to-day operations.

Day-to-day operations include facilitating the resolution of cases, driving high customer satisfaction, spearheading engagement with cross-functional teams including the Customer Success and Sales managers, Software Development, and Hardware Engineering. The ultimate outcomes you will be contributing to are an unparalleled customer experience coupled with excellent efficiency and efficacy. You will also be responsible for a higher level of service to Enterprise customers including first contact experience and ensuring white-glove experience.

This is a remote position open to candidates residing in the US except the San Francisco Bay Metro Area, NYC Metro Area, and Washington, D.C. Metro Area.    

In this role, you will: 

• Scalability: Spearhead and scale the current team of 120+ remote and in-office support agents, engineers, and managers, across multiple time zones.
• Issues Resolution: Drive resolution on technical issues affecting our customers in coordination with Product, Sales, and Customer Success, while adhering ot the contractual SLA’s and internal OLA’s on response and resolution times. 
• Team Development: Hire, develop, and direct inclusive, engaged, and high-performing teams across several geographies.
• CSAT, Trends & Insights: Deliver exceptional customer satisfaction by meeting and exceeding all operational and company CSAT targets. Improve CSAT and NPS by ensuring customer health insights are delivered to Product Management, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success.
• Increased Efficiency: Adapt and implement tools, metrics, and processes to enhance customer experiences and improve efficiency.
• Feedback Loop: Conduct reviews to accelerate the closure of support cases and to identify case-handling issues by providing direct feedback to engineers and management. 
• Process Optimization: Assess existing processes and innovate by working closely with Support to optimize case handling.
• Customer Experience: Measure, maintain, and improve support delivery processes to increase efficiency and provide a world-class customer experience.
• Staffing & Capacity: Conduct capacity planning, identify staffing requirements, and uplevel existing team’s skills to meet business goals and company growth.
• Data & KPIs: Conduct data investigation and derive performance insights from KPIs to drive decision making that improves customer experience and product quality.
• Innovate and Automate: Use data to identify automation opportunities to eliminate problems or make them easier to resolve.
• Customer Escalations: Partner with Sales and Customer Success to address customer feedback and drive high-priority escalated customer issues to resolution.
• Champion, role model, and embed Samsara’s cultural principles (Focus on Customer Success, Build for the Long Term, Adopt a Growth Mindset, Be Inclusive, Win as a Team) as we scale globally and across new offices.
• Hire, develop and lead an inclusive, engaged, and high performing team.

Minimum requirements for the role:

• 10+ years of leadership experience in Technical Support, Engineering, or Operations environment at Senior Manager or Director level. Experience managing multiple managers and senior managers across time zones and 175+ people organizations.
• Proven ability to take support organizations through rapid growth and expansion.
• Experience managing mid-market and enterprise support teams in a highly technical environment.
• A strategic thinker, able to come up with out-of-the-box solutions at scale.
• Strong analytical, data-driven, problem-resolution, and decision-making skills.
• Experience creating and implementing scalable standard operating procedures, performance metrics, and feedback mechanisms.
• Experience in handling highly visible escalations and working cross-functionally with the Product, Sales, and Customer Success teams to resolve.
• Strong operational excellence skills to drive effective execution of the team’s vision and operational metrics.

An ideal candidate also has:

• BS in Engineering (Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field), MBA is a plus.
• Combination of hardware/equipment and cloud-based product experience.
• Ability to proactively identify risks and dependencies and put in place plans to mitigate them.
• Adaptability, flexibility, and the conviction to “do the right thing” under stress, high tension, and tight deadlines.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills to be effective at collaborating with a wide variety of individuals.
• Ability to influence others, including those outside of the immediate team.
• Must be a strong leader with the ability to attract, motivate, retain and develop people.
• Experience in multiple CRM platforms (e.g. Zendesk, Salesforce) with a drive to leverage the platform to drive operational efficiency.