Technical Support Manager at SparkMeter

This is a leadership role that will be focused on developing and enabling staff through system & process enhancements, knowledge sharing and problem solving.

The enabling leadership will be delivered by providing solutions to the Technical Support team needs through system & process enhancements, offering ideas, perspective, tools, training, coaching, problem solving all drawn from experience. The goal is to deliver best in class technical support and develop technical processes that empower our sales achievement.

We already have a team of tremendously talented Product Experts and Technical Support Engineers and they deserve world class leadership.

You will be the first point of escalation for your team and will work to solve problems. This will involve frequent calls and meetings with customers, travel as needed and will require exhibiting exemplary customer management, diplomacy, communication, and root cause problem solving. In addition, you will need to know and utilize the escalation paths available to you to overcome impediments and get the job done.

Deliverables:

• 30 Day Diagnostic. Take the first month to get to know our systems, processes and people. Understand their challenges and opportunities. Produce a diagnostic revealing the biggest improvement opportunities, a target future state for each and a roadmap to achieve the future state.
• Improve our Zendesk system to empower analysis. Mature our use of Zendesk and set it up so we can perform powerful analysis of our performance and find insights from that analysis that lead to future improvements. Create visibility through use of dashboards and dynamic reporting.
• Own and develop our Technical Support Program (systems and processes) ensuring the delivery of our sales targets. Have and maintain knowledge of what best in class customer support for Saas and device OEMs looks like and ensure we are at or better than anyone else.
• Build a winning team culture. Create a culture of accountability, speed to deliverable, fosters ownership, energizes and aligns the team to shared goals. Develop skills within your team so that you are always creating depth in capability.
• Envision and implement a team structure for our business. Based on Sparkmeter’s goals (including growth plans), strategies, industry, and geographic footprint, develop a Support resourcing plan that includes the roles, skills, locations and scale of the team needed to keep us just slightly ahead of where we need to be and when. Resource the team with personnel that are capable of successfully selling into our target markets. Staff the support roles necessary to ensure the success of the team.
• Collaborate with Sales leadership to define what account management means and who owns which parts of it.
  • Complete a diagnostic looking specifically at what the Sales team needs from the Technical Support team to be successful and map a program to meet those needs
• Own and Project Manage Technical Product Root Cause Investigations of “Outlier” or trending issues your ticket system has revealed
  • This will require the cross collaboration of other teams as needed, a basic level of project management and a basic understanding of the corrective action investigation process
• We have a tracking and analysis system that can substantiate that 99% (1% allowance for variability) of communications are on time to our defined customer communication guidelines
• We have a data capture system linked to customer tickets and that data is being used by the customer experience director to provide the below analytics:
  • Categorization the issues by type (Hardware, Software, Set up, User, Environment, supplier non conformance)
  • Calculate historical frequency of occurrence and distribution of failure type and causes
  • Identify when a higher than usual frequency of failure “Outlier” is occurring and investigate to protect our Warranty (i.e Husk meter failures or Finlay DA-1000 failures)
  • And be identifying other valuable insights in to performance from available data
• Defined the staffing needs for the Customer Experience team needed to support the EMDU business and have created alignment with leadership on the justification for each new role
• Modify our customer satisfaction system to allow customers to communicate a scale of satisfaction (1-5)- not just whether we solved their problem or not AND receives and categorizes anecdotal customer feedback to define what could we do better.
  • Increase customer reporting of ticket resolution to 75%
  • Enhance our CSAT Customers Satisfaction measurement system to match best in class capabilities

How you operate:

Role model our values. Within your team you’ll implement initiatives for making people feel a part of the team and work in ways that are aligned with SparkMeter's values. Our values are:

• Take responsibility
• Listen to understand
• Act together
• Be a pioneer
• Grow capability

Be a scientist

• Substantiate/Challenge beliefs and perceptions through unbiased data collection
• When implementing solutions ensure that information collected is set up for analysis and can easily be used for that purpose

Problem Solving and technical resource: Have and offer a deep and broad operations playbook to serve as a collaboration partner, teacher and resource to the Supply Chain, Production Engineering, Compliance, Project Management and Support functions.

• Be a knowledge center for your function
• Proficient Excel and data management
• Know how ERP and work management systems can be utilized to drive performance and always be teaching the art of what’s achievable
• Maintain a knowledge base of various contemporary workplace solutions and utilize that knowledge to identify solutions to solve Sparkmeter needs

Role model service leadership. Be the invisible hero. Lift your team and everyone around you up by bringing them all value through….

• Role world class communications, especially when engaging customers
• Build the team. Your goal should be that the team doesn’t need you. It takes time to get processes and systems to operate
• Transparent goals and KPIs
• Profound empathy and connectivity
• Actionable, honest and frequent feedback- constant constructive accountability
• Celebrate and champion successes and the right behaviors
• Build constrictive professional understanding between you and everyone in your group. Meet with direct reports twice weekly and skip levels every other week

Be a change agent:

• Always challenge the current state
• Establish and drive a Continuous improvement program
• Work in the “Outerloop” focusing on sustainable change that solves core issues. Don’t get stuck patching up symptoms
• Set the bar for what good looks like and slowly over time keep raising it

Be the escalation path for your team:

• When your team need help step in to help solve them
• Guide- don’t direct resolution. Coach your team to solve problems on their own, don’t take away their right to learn and safely “fail” without being failures

To do this, you will need to:

• Have comfort and experience in building programs and systems. You’ll need to know and appreciate the value well developed systems and processes offer.
• Envision achievable performance levels and what people, systems and process are needed to create that performance and orchestrate the implementation of the needs to stay just a head of the curve
• Be resilient and see how to make things better. Overcome challenges, momentary system limitations, process inefficiencies, how we can always make things faster, more visible and easier.
• Be a people leader with a strong playbook of how to develop people towards their success and how to professionally and constructively identify where individuals are failing, be able to determine why and act accordingly.
• Be comfortable with a startup environment. If you’ve done it you know what this means. In short you have to build it as you perform it.

Required:

• Experience with growth stage startup environments
• 5+ years of experience as a technical support person operating in the field solving problems for hardware enabled software solutions.
• Proven ability to clearly understand and communicate technical details.
• Exceptional communication skills
• 1+ years of experience leading a technical support team.
• Know how to run a Root Cause investigation when there isn’t good data and variables are hard to pin down
• Knowledge a comfort with standard project management software and best practices

Nice to have (bonus points):

• Expertise in microgrids and/or metering or operating sales in a Utility or Energy EPC industries
• AWS knowledge and software coding skills
• Electrical Engineering knowledge