Escalation Manager

Mission

The Customer Escalation Manager is responsible for leading the resolution of high-priority customer escalations while ensuring an exceptional customer experience throughout the escalation lifecycle. This role serves as the primary point of accountability for escalated issues, combining structured escalation management with strong customer advocacy, proactive communication, and disciplined execution against defined SLAs and contractual commitments.

The ideal candidate is customer-obsessed, calm under pressure, and highly skilled at managing complex, high-impact situations with professionalism and empathy. Success in this role is measured not only by speed and quality of resolution, but by the customer’s confidence in the process, clarity of communication, and the long-term improvement of customer outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

Customer Experience & Advocacy

• Serve as the primary customer-facing owner of escalations, ensuring customers feel informed, supported, and confident throughout the resolution process
• Act as a strong customer advocate internally by translating business impact, urgency, and expectations into clear action plans and priorities
• Ensure communications are clear, timely, empathetic, and solution-oriented, reinforcing trust during high-pressure situations
• Drive a consistent, high-quality escalation experience by setting expectations, aligning on next steps, and maintaining transparency

Escalation Leadership & SLA Ownership

• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of escalations from intake through resolution, ensuring compliance with SLAs, contractual obligations, and internal quality standards
• Drive progress through structured execution, strong accountability, and effective stakeholder coordination
• Monitor escalation timelines and SLA performance, proactively identifying risks and implementing mitigation strategies to maintain delivery commitments
• Escalate internally as needed to secure prioritization, alignment, resources, or decisions required to achieve customer outcomes

Cross-Functional Execution & Project Management

• Lead cross-functional collaboration across Engineering, Product, Support, Operations, and leadership teams to deliver timely resolutions
• Establish escalation action plans with clear milestones, owners, priorities, and delivery timelines
• Facilitate escalation operating rhythms (triage calls, war rooms, executive updates) to ensure momentum, clarity, and alignment
• Track progress, risks, and dependencies and remove blockers to maintain forward movement and resolution certainty

Communication, Reporting & Stakeholder Management

• Provide clear and consistent status updates to customers and internal stakeholders, including executive-ready summaries when required
• Ensure customers understand impact, progress, expected timelines, and resolution plans in business-friendly language
• Maintain escalation documentation, including customer communications, decision logs, action tracking, and final outcomes
• Support internal reporting and insights to improve escalation transparency and operational visibility

Root Cause Analysis & Continuous Improvement

• Partner with internal teams to support issue triage, root cause analysis, and corrective/preventative action planning
• Lead post-resolution reviews focused on both technical outcomes and customer experience learnings
• Identify recurring patterns, systemic risks, or operational gaps impacting customers and drive improvements to prevent future escalations
• Contribute to improving escalation frameworks, playbooks, processes, and customer communication standards

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in customer escalation management, customer success, technical support operations, program/project management, or related disciplines
• Proven ability to manage complex, high-severity escalations while maintaining strong customer experience, communication and SLA outcomes
• Strong customer-facing communication skills, including experience engaging with senior customer stakeholders
• Strong internal communication skills with internal stakeholders at all levels
• Demonstrated ability to implement AI tools and techniques to reduce total time to resolution while enhancing customer experience. Candidates should be comfortable leveraging AI to optimize efficiency, automate decision-making, and drive measurable improvements in service delivery
• Experience supporting AI-enabled products, platforms, or workflows
• Creating reporting on KPI and metric results and implementing improvement plans to meet KPI goals
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence outcomes without direct authority
• Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities and deliver results under pressure
• Ability to balance urgency, empathy, and operational discipline in high-impact situations

Core Competencies

• Customer-first mindset with strong advocacy and relationship management
• Escalation leadership and structured execution discipline
• Results-driven with focus on SLA performance and customer confidence
• Executive-level communication and stakeholder alignment
• Strong cross-functional influence and coordination skills
• Presenting in monthly/quarterly business reviews on organizational results to company KPIs and metrics
• Analytical problem solving and continuous improvement orientation
• Calm, professional judgment in high-pressure situations

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting enterprise or strategic customer accounts
• Familiarity with SaaS platforms and technical support/product development lifecycles
• Project management certification or experience (CAPM, PMP, Agile/Scrum, ITIL)
• Experience establishing escalation governance, customer experience standards, or operational excellence programs