Director, Strategic Accounts and Customer Success

Key Responsibilities

• Own and deepen relationships across strategic/enterprise accounts; set joint success plans that drive retention and growth.
• Lead Customer Success and Customer Care; set priorities and clear accountability across both teams.
• Develop and lead Customer Success Managers; build a high-trust, high-performance culture with measurable expectations.
• Develop and lead Customer Care; measurable expectations including accurate, fast turnaround on pricing updates and a proactive communication strategy for purchase orders impacted by production delays.
• Partner with R&D, Quality, and Operations to translate customer needs into an innovation, improvement, and commercialization pipeline; support commercialization trials, define product validation success criteria/attributes, and enable scale-up.
• Drive heavy project/program management across customer initiatives, including the implementation and use of a project tracking system.
• Implement AI and automation to improve case quality and productivity (e.g., triage, knowledge management) with defined controls and measurable adoption.
• Improve customer-facing service levels and claims performance in close partnership with Quality; reduce cycle time, increase first-contact resolution, and prevent repeat issues through root-cause problem solving and clear role clarity (e.g., RASCI).
• Ensure account ownership covers the financial/customer impact and keeps customers proactively informed as issues are investigated and resolved with Quality and Operations.
• Champion CRM and other platform adoption (process, training, governance, and engagement) and use dashboards/insights to drive decisions and KPI/SLA performance (including Power BI where applicable).

Qualifications

• 10+ years leading strategic/enterprise customer relationships (e.g., multi-site or global accounts) in manufacturing, food & beverage, industrial equipment, and/or high-tech.
• Demonstrated people leadership (e.g., leading managers and/or a 3+ person team) in Customer Success, Customer Care, and/or Customer Operations.
• Effective communication and analytical skills; uses data and customer insights to drive decisions and is comfortable working in CRM, Power BI, and similar platforms, including supporting commercial needs such as pricing/financial acumen and RFP responses.
• Strong executive presence; proven success influencing stakeholders and improving measurable outcomes (e.g., retention, CSAT/NPS, SLA attainment, or expansion).
• Proven cross-functional program leadership delivering customer-impacting initiatives (e.g., service model changes, claims process redesign, escalations, or product/quality improvements).
• Working knowledge of complex supply chains and planning (e.g., S&OP, forecasting, lead times, capacity constraints, inventory strategy).
• Ability to travel up to 20%.