Customer Escalation Manager

Key Responsibilities

• Monitor and triage inbound support tickets to surface critical escalations, recurring themes, and potential systemic issues.
• Act as the first point of contact for complex and high-impact customer escalations that exceed standard support channels.
• Own and manage the end-to-end escalation and problem management lifecycle in coordination with Product and Engineering teams, from identification to resolution, ensuring alignment with internal SLAs.
• Ensure escalated items are prioritized and routed appropriately across Support, Engineering, and Product teams.
• Manage customer communications regarding escalated issues through written and verbal channels (email, calls, virtual meetings).
• Serve as a trusted advocate for customers during escalations, preserving customer satisfaction while balancing internal priorities.
• Partner closely with Support Agents, Technical Support Engineers, Engineering, and Product leadership to orchestrate timely and effective resolution of escalations.
• Act as liaison to ensure escalations are visible to and supported by the appropriate resolver teams.
• Establish, document, and enforce escalation standards, including a "fix-forward" policy where relevant.
• Contribute to refining escalation workflows, playbooks, and internal runbooks.
• Analyze trends in escalations and problem occurrence to identify opportunities to reduce recurrence.
• Facilitate and support incident retrospectives, ensuring teams understand root causes, contributing factors, and follow-up actions.
• Guide teams through incident reporting and post-incident processes, helping ensure consistent execution and high-quality outcomes.
• Provide actionable recommendations to improve product usability, support processes, documentation, and customer onboarding, and ensure agreed-upon actions are tracked to completion.
• Manage risk escalation and ensure resolution trajectories minimize customer impact.
• Deliver timely reporting and insights on escalation performance, metrics, and adherence to SLAs, aligned with organizational goals.

Qualifications

• 3–5+ years in escalation management, technical support, customer success, or related fields.
• Proven experience managing customer-impacting incidents in a production SaaS environment, including use of incident management tooling (such as incident.io) to coordinate responders, manage timelines, and drive post-incident actions.
• Curious and data-driven mindset with experience analyzing trends and reporting on outcomes.
• Strong ability to work with datasets, metrics, and reporting to debug issues, assess customer impact, and drive data-informed escalation and post-incident decisions.
• Familiarity with support platforms and issue tracking tools (e.g., Zendesk and Jira).
• Clear customer and internal communication skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical concepts.
• Excellent prioritization and organizational skills.