Associate Director, Customer Experience

About the role

This role is accountable for how every customer feels after they meet us: the resolution of every question, the speed of every reply, the consistency of every interaction, and the loyalty we earn on the other side of it. You'll set the vision for what world-class customer happiness looks like at True Classic — and then go build and run it.

Responsibilities

• Set the vision for what customer happiness means at True Classic, and translate it into a clear, measurable operating plan the team can execute against.
• Define the experience standards — tone, response times, resolution quality, and policy — that apply consistently across DTC, TikTok Shop, Amazon, wholesale, and retail, held to a Ritz-Carlton / Nordstrom-level bar.
• Own the customer happiness roadmap: where we invest, what we automate, what we build, and what we fix next, prioritized by customer and business impact.
• Be the internal voice of the customer — bring the truth of what customers are experiencing into the rooms where decisions get made.
• Build and run an AI-native customer happiness function — combining best-in-class external platforms (Kodif, Gorgias) with in-house-built automation and agents.
• Deploy AI and automation across the whole journey — triage and routing, agent assist, RAG-powered knowledge, and returns/refund automation — and move each from pilot to production with clear governance and guardrails.
• Own the customer happiness tech stack end-to-end — helpdesk (Gorgias), AI automation (Kodif), Shopify, Klaviyo, and the integrations that connect them — and continuously raise the bar on what it can do.
• Build the measurement layer that proves it's working: deflection and autonomous resolution rates, cost-per-ticket, throughput per hour, and the quality scores that keep automation honest.
• Run world-class day-to-day support across every channel customers reach us on — email, SMS, iMessage, live chat, social DMs (Meta — Facebook and Instagram), TikTok Shop, Amazon messaging, and voice — all flowing into Gorgias as one queue, one set of standards, one team, to clear SLAs for response and resolution.
• Own the post-purchase moments that matter most: order tracking, lost-shipment investigation, returns, exchanges, refunds, and replacements — handled fast, fairly, and on-policy.
• Own the knowledge base and FAQ (e.g. Notion) so customers and agents — human and AI — always work from one accurate, current source of truth.
• Manage ratings and reviews across every place True Classic shows up — on-site product reviews (Okendo), Amazon, Google, Trustpilot, the App Store, social, and the long tail of review sites and forums.
• Own True Classic Insiders, our loyalty program — its strategy, performance, and roadmap.
• Own the customer happiness scorecard: CSAT, NPS, CES, first-contact resolution, response and resolution times, contact rate, cost-per-ticket, throughput per hour, refund save rate, and revenue generated in support conversations — and their connection to retention and LTV.
• Partner with Marketing to align customer happiness with brand voice, lifecycle, and the broader customer journey.
• Collaborate with Data/Analytics and Engineering to build the reporting and in-house tooling that scales the function.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in customer experience, customer service, or customer success — including direct ownership of a customer-facing function at a high-growth DTC or e-commerce brand.
• Proven experience leading both onshore and offshore teams, and managing BPO partners to a high standard.
• Hands-on fluency with DTC customer service tooling — Gorgias and Kodif (or comparable platforms such as Kustomer, Richpanel, Gladly, or Zendesk) are particularly important — plus Shopify and Klaviyo.
• Track record of building and improving systems — knowledge bases, QA frameworks, SLAs, staffing models — not just running day-to-day operations.
• Strong command of CX metrics (CSAT, NPS, CES, FCR, contact rate, cost-per-ticket) and how they connect to retention and LTV.
• A builder and a leader: you can set the vision and roll up your sleeves to deliver it. Comfortable being hands-on in a fast-moving, lean environment.
• Deep, real customer empathy — you go the extra mile for customers and expect your team to do the same.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving, matrixed, omni-channel organization.