Sr. Critical Situations Escalation Manager

Smartsheet is a tech company with a human story to tell. We’re here to empower teams to manage projects, automate workflows, and rapidly build new secure solutions, using simple no-code tools. We’re revolutionaries – so for us changing the way the world works is all in a day’s work.

As Sr. Critical Situations Escalation Manager you will lead and manage resolution of our most strategic accounts through challenging periods of their Smartsheet journey.  These challenges could be due to user adoption, product issues, solutions scale, professional services, support experience, communication, and/or customer service concerns.  This role brings strategy, structure, and executive engagement to marshall company-wide resources to assist customers placed in Critical Situations across our three global regions. The Global Critical Situations program will ensure a high level of customer satisfaction, retention, and expansion resulting in both resolution of each customer’s challenges to a healthy state and continuous improvement and institutional learning from each customer engagement to prevent recurrences across our install base. 

Not only will you be on the front line with many of Smartsheet’s largest customer relationships, but also those struggling with ambitious innovative solution plans intended to lead our install base forward.  Your work will be global and highly cross-functional in nature. You will problem-solve alongside leaders in other teams such as Product, Support, Sales, and Finance, to drive resolution and elevate the customer experience.

You will report to the Manager, Critical Situations Team in the Customer Excellence Global Shared Services organization within the Go-to-Market team, and the role is fully remote eligible.

You Will:

• Own the resolution of the identified issue for the most complex and valuable customers by partnering with internal relationship owners to communicate directly with customers.
• Lead support triage to identify and clearly articulate the customer situation and provide a rapid response with the recommended next steps, internal communication with cross-functional teams, and needed short-term team members
• Clearly define your role and responsibilities with internal and external teams
• Identify process gaps and themes with product, engineering, and other teams as necessary to drive change and ensure timely customer communication
• Persuade, influence, and motivate people; build a culture of creating delightful customer experiences and relationships
• Engage with and lead external customer communications while accounts are in the Critical Situation process to ensure customers are receiving status updates
• Lead Executive communications with customers as necessary during Critical Situations
• Ensure team members across Go-To-Market are following and leveraging the correct escalation paths
• Influence roadmap prioritization with Product and Engineering to resolve customer challenges
• Demonstrate an expert-level understanding of the company's products and services, providing guidance to address complex challenges
• Advise and mentor Critical Situations Escalation Managers on effective strategies for supporting customers in critical situations.
• Have the flexibility in your working hours to team with global customers, and willingness to be “on call” for your Critical Situation accounts
• Participate in customer meetings including up to 25% travel
• Perform other duties as assigned

You Have:

• 7+ years of experience managing globally diverse, large, and cross-functional initiatives
• 5+ years of experience working with the Smartsheet Platform 
• Implemented SaaS technology in large enterprise settings as a leader of customer or services teams
• Understanding of SaaS organizational and operational constructs including Product, engineering, support, success, sales, services 
• Ability to quickly establish trust and to influence others, both internally and externally
• Ability to handle conflict and drive agreement on decisions for which conflicting opinions and input exist
• Strong data-driven decision-making skills, and process-oriented mindset
• Knowledge of Lean, Six Sigma, and continuous improvement approaches
• Ability to identify risks and dependencies and put in place plans to mitigate them
• Adaptability, flexibility, and the conviction to “do the right thing” by keeping a customer-centric mentality at all times
• Ability to deal with ambiguity, utilize robust problem-solving skills, demonstrate situational agility, manage parallel efforts, and communicate effectively through multiple channels 
• Exceptional business acumen and world-class presentation and customer interaction skills that have been acquired through deep technical knowledge and well-developed process management
• Goal orientation to drive progress for each customer through each interaction
• Experience with Smartsheet, Kibana, Snowflake, Tableau, Sparkpost, and Google Suite is optional but highly desired
• Knowledge of the Smartsheet platform is optional but highly desired