Vice President, Escalations & Supportability

Are you a visionary leader that likes to build and develop high performing teams? Are you a tireless customer champion? If so, we want you as the Vice President of Supportability and Escalations, Customer Support at Okta. 

The Okta Customer Support Team is focused on making Okta customers, developers and partners successful by advocating on their behalf, resolving technical issues and challenges, and maintaining the high-quality service they expect. 

As a leader of the Okta Customer Escalations and Supportability reporting to the Senior Vice President of Customer Support, you will grow, develop and motivate a team of technical experts and lead day-to day operations. You will work across the Okta product set, working hand in hand with Customer First, customer support, engineering, product management teams, and account teams to improve the overall customer experience. 

As part of this role, you will have three primary responsibilities: Managing our Critical Accounts Program, managing customer support escalations, managing our customer support trust communications and leading our supportability process at Okta to reduce customer friction in the use of the Okta platform. 

This role will have a major impact on the Okta brand by interfacing with senior executives at our customers, being an advocate for improving our product and support experience both on a comprehensive and individual customer level. 

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES 

• Be a leading customer advocate in interfacing with CISOs, CIOs and Executive Sponsors with our Customers to ensure timely prompt resolution to their significant issues. 
• Develop and manage a comprehensive long term strategy for the function which scales to our long term goals for a great customer and employee experience - at scale. 
• Lead organization through change and ensure that our team members are enabled and empowered 
• Manage and oversee the customer escalation function and team at Okta to ensure that Okta is addressing with urgency outstanding customer cases. 
• Lead the oversight of Okta’s Critical Account process to ensure timely resolution of key customer issues. This includes leading discussions with our leadership team to present and summarize action plans with executive leadership at Okta. 
• Lead the oversight of our trust communications process on trust status and RCA. This also includes leading and implementing improvements in people, process and technology to improve our communication with our customers.
• Lead customer supportability team to identify and partner with product teams to identify improvement areas to reduce friction points in the use of Okta, including improvements to the availability of our service. 
• Ensure the readiness of customer support staff in the launch of new products and monthly releases. 
• Conduct case reviews to help accelerate closure of support cases and to identify case handling issues; provide feedback to engineers and management, as needed. 
• Oversee interlock meetings with product and engineering team to resolve critical customer enhancements and product issues. This includes working closely with the engineering and product teams to identify opportunities to scale our platform for our top customers. 

QUALIFICATIONS: 

• 10+ years of customer support and/or services experience 
• Experience in working in SaaS environment 
• Bachelor’s Degree, preferably in a technical discipline. Master’s degree/MBA is a plus.
• A strategic thinker, able to come up with out of the box solutions, while also having strong operational excellence skills to be able to drive strong execution of the team’s vision and operational metrics. 
• Work independently driving improvement initiatives 
• Strong oral and written communication skills and be effective at collaborating with a wide variety of individuals. 
• Experience in leading organizations through change with strong employee empathy 
• Experience in handling highly visible escalations 
• Ability to influence others, including those outside of the immediate team. 
• Ability to handle conflict and drive agreement on decisions for which conflicting opinions and input exist. Strong, data driven problem resolution and decision-making skills. 
• Ability to proactively identify risks and dependencies and put in place plans to mitigate them. 
• Adaptability, flexibility and the conviction to “do the right thing” under stress, high tension and tight deadlines. 
• Must be a strong leader with the ability to attract, motivate, retain and develop people.
• Familiarity with the security or identity management industry is a strong plus. 
• Strong work ethic and ability to work in a dynamic environment. 

Okta’s Top 5 Core Leadership Competencies are part of the deeply ingrained principles that guide all of our company’s actions. They also align strongly to our cultural cornerstones, our Okta values: love our customers, empower our people, never stop innovating, act with integrity, and maintain transparency. It’s our expectation that our managers and leaders embody these core competencies: 

• Builds Effective Teams: Building strong-identity teams that apply their diverse skills and perspectives to achieve common goals. 
• Demonstrates Self-Awareness (EQ): Using a combination of feedback and reflection to gain productive insight into personal strengths and weaknesses. 
• Develops Talent: Developing people to meet both their career goals and the organization’s goals. 
• Drives Results: Consistently achieving results, even under tough circumstances. 
• Strategic Mindset: Seeing ahead to future possibilities and translating them into breakthrough strategies.