VP, Customer Support, Community, and Knowledge

General Description:

The VP of Customer Support, Community, and Knowledge will define and execute a cohesive company strategy for Administration and End-user Support and Community in addition to ensuring high quality and localized content creation of D2L product and services. Our ideal candidate will ensure D2L consistently delivers support that exceeds customers’ expectations, lead a global team with high performance and will contribute to the company achieving revenue and customer retention targets. This leader will work closely with other departmental leaders to enable positive outcomes, operational efficiency and foster a collaborative culture at all levels.  

How Will I Make an Impact?:

Performance and People 

• You will attract, recruit, train and retain top talent; supporting team members growth and development. 
• You lead by example, showing others what great looks like to up-level your next level of leaders, and so on throughout the org.  Nothing is beneath this role. 
• You are responsible for multiple teams of Admin Support, End User Support, Community, Knowledge and Localization. Ensuring cross-functional collaboration across teams is critical to generating great client outcomes. 
• You will be responsible for capacity planning, ensuring staffing requirements are met, and making hiring decisions in partnership with leadership team.  
• Responsibility for allocating budgets across teams to achieve operational target margins. 
• You will act as a coach and mentor to your Leaders helping them to grow their skills and increase performance over time. 
• You will provide career path opportunities, give regular feedback, and create a collaborative and open environment. 
• You’re mindful of driving operational excellence through efficiency, speed to resolution, and acting with urgency while consistently maintaining high customer satisfaction levels. 
• Act with urgency when high priority customer escalations arise from time to time, and lead from the front in these moments. 
• You will be responsible for performance management in accordance with company policies and procedures. 
• You will build relationships and look for opportunities to collaborate and knowledge share with Services, Product Development, Engineering, Sales, Marketing and other Customer Engagement teams 
• You will help grow and develop new leaders within Global Support, Community and Knowledge and the broader Customer Engagement division.  
• Previous experience managing a global support organization is required. 

People Leadership and Performance 

• You are passionate about people leadership and leading effective teams.   
• You will manage a team of D2Lers and champion a high performing culture.  
• You will connect your team’s day to day accountabilities to D2L’s mission by setting clear objectives and performance expectations with your team members.  
• You will collaborate through cross-functional teams to accomplish established corporate and team goals and effectively manage relationships with other D2L teams. 
• Responsible for supporting vision, planning and defining team objectives, and leading execution of objectives. 
• Work with your peers and leaders to drive productivity, efficiency, and hold team accountable for high quality outcomes on a consistent basis. 
• Play key role with interviewing, hiring and onboarding new team members. Provide expertise and coaching/mentorship to the team members. 
• Produce and actively participate in knowledge sharing as well as professional development initiatives. 
• Present updates to Executive audiences on a regular basis. 
• Synthesize large amounts of operational data, metrics, KPIs and customer feedback to make operational decisions and support leaders to be more efficient. 
• You will bring a highly analytics mindset to D2L and be an authoritative subject matter expert on all areas of Customer Support. 

Customer Management 

• You will act as a leadership sponsor (when asked) and escalation point for customers, representing Global Support with prospects and customer executives 
• You will the achievement of a 85%+ average CSAT score across all channels, with the goal of increasing this baseline over time. 
• You will define a Community strategy ensuring case deflection results are achieved and that customers leverage high-quality Community assets on an increasing basis over time. 
• You will innovate within Global Support, Community and Knowledge in order to drive costs down, while providing a phenomenal customer experience 
• You have experience implementing Artificial Intelligence into key workflows and processes to increase the customer experience and efficiency of overall Support operations. 
• You have experience optimizing the life-cycle of a support case, and detecting inefficiencies across systems, handoffs and processes to consistently drive down backlog and case aging. 
• You will model and demonstrate an ability to turn complex and frustrating customer situations into positive outcomes with high satisfaction. 

Departmental and Revenue 

• You will maintain and establish positive relationships with third party support providers ensuring they deliver the same high-quality case management experience (CSAT) within budget (margin achieved) 
• You are focused on delivering business results and have managed a global Support organization.   
• You will have departmental budget ownership, collecting and summarizing departmental metrics, operational activities, and other information and communicating these to the rest of the organization. 
• You will guide your team to effective and efficiently resolve cases, while increasing quality and performance while decreasing the cost of support. 
• You will be responsible for successful SLA/SLO adherence across all customers. 
• You will ensure target margins are achieved on a regular basis. 
• You will be responsible for managing, planning, and reporting on business metrics for the department, including financial, customer satisfaction, and initiative success.  
• Previous experience with budget ownership is required. 

Solutions & Offerings 

• You will drive innovation and continual process improvement within the department to ensure Global Support, Community and Knowledge delivers industry leading services. 
• You will proactively look for opportunities to grow the business and provide value to existing customers and prospects through new and improved capabilities and practices across the team. 
• You will work with your teams to create new solution offerings based on insights from the team, feedback from customers and industry trends.  
• You will interact with internal and external customer groups at all levels as well as with senior management and executives internally. 
• You will partner cross functionally to support GTM readiness for new offerings. 
• You will ensure that ongoing sales enablement is prioritized and delivered effectively. 
• You will partner with Product Management to find opportunities to improve the product to make Global Support, Community and Knowledge ever more efficient and to provide a phenomenal customer experience. 

What you’ll bring to the role: 

• Bachelor's degree in Business, IT, or related field; MBA preferred.
• 10+ years of experience in customer support, with at least 5 years in a leadership role.
• Proven track record of managing support teams in a SaaS environment.
• Experience implementing Artificial Intelligence to drive meaningful business outcomes. 
• Strong understanding of customer support metrics and data analytics.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
• Strategic thinker with strong problem-solving abilities.
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, dynamic environment. 

Education Recommendations: 

• Bachelor's degree required; MBA or related graduate degree preferred 
• Technical and business-related degrees considered ideal