Customer De-Escalation & Engagement Advisory Manager

The Customer Office operates as a part of Unified Support, with a primary responsibility for managing the support relationship with IFS customers. Its core mission is to enhance customer satisfaction and maximize lifetime value, thereby fostering customer retention and renewals. A crucial aspect of this function is managing Engagement Advisory and Account Escalations, which ensures a strong and enduring customer relationship by providing assurance and effective control in challenging situations.

The Customer Office serves as a bridge between customers and IFS, working to align our organization's efforts with customer expectations and needs. Through its functions and initiatives, it aims to create a customer-centric culture within IFS, driving continuous improvement and ultimately delivering greater value to our customers. The De-Escalation & Engagement Advisory Manager is hybrid role covering two key functions within the Customer Office:

Engagement Advisory - where the goal is to increase customer satisfaction and lifetime value, ultimately to drive retention and renewals by working in a pooled model servicing many customers to help them achieve successful outcomes for their business. Operating programmatically and prescriptively to increase customer satisfaction and lifetime value, ultimately driving retention and renewals.

Account Escalation - handling high business impact customer situations that cannot be resolved by the standard support function. It comes into play when customer issues have escalated to a critical level that necessitates intervention across all involved parties to restore normal operations with complete confidence in IFS. Hence, it has specific entry and exit criteria to ensure effective management.

Overall Competence Required:

Essential

• Operational experience within a mission critical environment
• Critical thinking and decision making ability
• Ability to keep calm under pressure and manage difficult customer situations
• Understanding of support Service Level Agreements and their application
• Analytical, structured, and methodical in approach
• Ability to work independently with limited management support to achieve the escalation results
• Excellent English and Japanese communication skills, both written and oral
• Confidence in talking to customers at both operational and C-Level
• Leadership skills to manage both remote and onsite project teams
• Experience participating in postmortem investigations
• Ability to meet challenging targets within tight deadlines
• Ability to guide people towards customer centric behaviors
• The ability to quickly understand the customer's business processes, system landscapes and underlying technologies

Desirable

• An understanding of IFS product architectures and underlying technologies sufficient to allow informed decisions in a dynamic and time-pressured environment

Essential

• Relevant industry experience
• 2+ years of successful project or escalation management experience
• 5+ years in customer support or professional service delivery roles
• Natural skills in building relationships and finding support to get the job done
• Able to operate in fast paced, geographically and culturally diverse teams
• A strong team player and networker
• A great communicator who helps build the IFS brand

Desirable

• Negotiating skills within a context of high political sensitivity and conflicting interests
• Comfortable working within a matrix-rich organisation

We believe that coming together as a community, in person, is important for innovation, connection and fostering a sense of belonging. Our roles have the right balance of remote and in-office working to enable flexibility for managing your life along with ensuring a real connection with your colleagues and the broader IFS community.