Director, Technical Support (L2)

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 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 lead 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 lead 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.

You should apply if:

• You want to impact the industries that run our world: Your efforts will result in real-world impact—helping to keep the lights on, get food into grocery stores, reduce emissions, and most importantly, ensure workers return home safely.
• You are the architect of your own career: If you put in the work, this role won’t be your last at Samsara. We set up our employees for success and have built a culture that encourages rapid career development, countless opportunities to experiment and master your craft in a hyper growth environment.
• You’re energized by our opportunity: The vision we have to digitize large sectors of the global economy requires your full focus and best efforts to bring forth creative, ambitious ideas for our customers.
• You want to be with the best: At Samsara, we win together, celebrate together and support each other. You will be surrounded by a high-caliber team that will encourage you to do your best. 

Click here to learn about what we value at Samsara.

In this role, you will:

• Scalability: Lead and scale the current team of 40+ remote and in-office support agents, engineers, and managers, across multiple time zones.
• Service Levels: Ensure contractual SLAs and internal OLA’s  on response times and internal OLAs on resolution times are met across all communication channels (phone, web, chat) against committed targets. 
• Issues Resolution: Drive resolution on technical issues affecting our customers in coordination with Product, Sales, and Customer Success.
• Team Development: Hire, develop, and lead inclusive, engaged, and high-performing teams across several geographies.
• Trends & Insights: 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.
• Operational Excellence: Oversee customer experience and operational excellence for support of Samsara’s portfolio of products and services.
• Collaboration & Partnerships: Work closely with cross-functional teams and regional partners to drive world-class customer experience.
• Customer Satisfaction: Deliver exceptional customer satisfaction by meeting and exceeding all operational and company CSAT targets.
• 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.
• Product Training: Ensure team readiness for supporting new products and services by providing effective training and development.
• 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.
• Employee Coaching: Provide regular employee coaching and ongoing guidance to help team members achieve career development aspirations.
• Data & KPIs: Conduct data analysis 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.
• Leadership Principles: Champion, role model, and embed Samsara’s culture and leadership principles.
• Hire, develop and lead an inclusive, engaged, and high performing team.

Minimum requirements for the role:

• BS in Engineering (Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field), MBA is a plus.
• 10+ years of leadership experience in Technical Support, Engineering, or Operations environment at Senior Manager or Director level.
• Combination of hardware/equipment and cloud-based product experience.
• 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.
• Superior verbal and written communication skills to be effective at collaborating with a wide variety of individuals.
• Strong operational excellence skills to drive effective execution of the team’s vision and operational metrics.
• Experience in handling highly visible escalations and working cross-functionally with the Product, Sales, and Customer Success teams to resolve.
• 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.
• 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.