Vice President, Global Support Operations

Key Skills

B2B, Effective communication skills, SaaS

Job Description

This Vice President role is about the future of support delivered today—modernizing our tools, technologies, and processes to envision a segmented customer experience that resolves customer issues as well as helps answer their how-to questions—when and how the customer prefers…e.g., self-service or expert help. This leader will ask themselves how they can revolutionize and transform Support Services at Avalara!

Specifically, the Vice President of Global Support Operations is a strategic role and needs a visionary leader who aims to deliver the future of support today. One who balances strategy with disciplined execution. A leader with executive presence who inspires confidence and commitment from the 200+ GSO experts around the world. A pacesetter who relentlessly focuses on an easy, simple, delightful customer experience and who, daily, empathizes with our customers and partners. An innovator who keeps a pulse on market-leading technologies and embraces an innovative approach leveraging Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and automation with the desired outcome to exceed customer expectations—at the first call.

The GSO VP will continually refine and improve GSO KPIs and will partner and closely collaborate with product management, service enablement, and engineering teams, which are instrumental in creating products and support services for our global customers. The mission is to create a flywheel (customer experience journey/ feedback loop) that tracks, documents and understands customer issues and recommends product enhancements to eliminate them before they occur.

This position will require you to:

• Explore and advise our executive leadership on new technologies, including AI, ML, data, and analytics advancements to improve productivity, support services, and customer engagement.
• Provide vision and direction to implement strategies, processes, and technologies to deliver world-class customer service in defined segmented experiences consistently.
• Lead and manage a globally diverse organization.
• Demonstrated ability to hire, inspire and manage non-US based teams. Experience with overseas labor practices, opportunities, and pitfalls.
• Ability to build a common set of global practices and principles for the support services team to include procedures related to case intake, case resolution, customer escalation, and incident management
• Build a highly engaging customer support self-service program that will allow for future customer growth with minimized support resources to ensure all aspects of the customer relationship are considered in defining these solutions.
• Develop a proactive approach to establish a best-in-class support services experience to continuously improve customer engagement and satisfaction for numerous customer profiles from ESB to our largest enterprise customers.
• Partner with our product and services leaders to ensure customer issues are known and recommendations for product and service improvements are documented for continuous improvement.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to define new and highly scalable processes for resolving product bugs, customer challenges, and concerns.
• Increase CSAT, time to resolution. Reduce churn, DSAT.
• Work with engineering and product management teams to further develop training solutions, documentation access, customer communities, self-service, customer engagement tools, ticketing systems, and the like.

The Vice President of Global Support Operations will have excellent functional expertise in leading and collaborating with professional services, technical operations, product management, engineering, and product development. In addition, we are looking for the following:

MUST HAVE :

Minimum of 8 yeras experence at a VP operations experence

Salesforce experence

• Ability to inspire a team to pursue unwavering excellence
• Strong executive presence to represent one of the most critical functions at Avalara.
• Proven leader and motivator with deep experience building and leading large global customer support and professional services operations—preferably at a global SaaS company.
• A reputation for creating a work environment that continually promotes quality and employee effectiveness; consistently attracts new talent to the business at all levels; retains key high performers and high potential employees.
• Demonstrated ability to always see from the customer's point of view.
• Proven relationship management skills.
• Executive presence and gravitas with the ability to influence executive leadership here at Avalara.
• Excellent capabilities in maximizing customer satisfaction by using key metrics to balance operational metrics against customer service/satisfaction metrics.
• Has driven organizations through rapid growth and global expansion at scale.
• Demonstrated experience driving operational excellence.
• History of executive-level experience working with global customers across multiple enterprise engagement cycles.
• Experience evaluating internal customer care processes and workflows.
• Experience supporting enterprise customers across different industry sectors.
• Experience in financial management, including budget management and strategic budget decisions.

What You'll Need to be Successful

To be successful, you will need to have:

• 15+ years of building and implementing support offerings in high-growth, B2B, SaaS, cloud, and technology industries supporting a global customer base.
• Salesforce experience preferred
• 10+ years of experience managing a geographically distributed customer-facing technical support organization across culturally diverse teams.
• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience
• Proven track record of successful experience bringing new cloud products, services, and support offerings to market.
• Experienced in modernizing a global, product-focused customer services and support team by up-selling/cross-selling based on customer issues—leveraging modern processes, technology, and service models to do it smoothly and at a profit
• Ability to form strong cross-functional relationships and influence others to achieve a common goal, including our customer base.
• Exceptional capabilities in oral and written communications with experience effectively presenting ideas and information across all levels of an organization.

Highly adaptable.

Able to prioritize challenges and changes in a timely manner while driving for the best possible

How We'll Take Care of You

Total Rewards

In addition to a great compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave, many Avalara employees are eligible for bonuses.

Health & Wellness

Benefits vary by location but generally include private medical, life, and disability insurance.

Inclusive culture and diversity

Avalara strongly supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is committed to integrating them into our business practices and our organizational culture. We also have a total of 8 employee-run resource groups, each with senior leadership and exec sponsorship.

Flexible hybrid working

We support hybrid work and flexible schedules for our employees.

Learn more about our benefits by region here: https://careers.avalara.com/

About Avalara

We’re Avalara. We’re defining the relationship between tax and tech.

We’ve already built an industry-leading cloud compliance platform, processing nearly 40 billion customer API calls and over 5 million tax returns a year.

Last year, our tribe expanded by a cool thousand people - there’s nearly 5,000 of us now. Our growth is real, and we’re not slowing down - not until we’ve achieved our mission - to be part of every transaction in the world.

We’re bright, innovative and disruptive, like the orange we love to wear. It captures our quirky spirit and optimistic mindset. It shows off the culture we’ve designed, that empowers our people to win. Ownership and achievement go hand in hand here. We instill passion in our people through the trust we place in them.

We’ve been different from day one. Join us, and your career will be too.