Customer Service Desk Manager

Position Summary

The Customer Service Desk Manager leads a customer-facing help desk providing 24×7 support for software and services. This role is accountable for dependable shift coverage, responsive customer support, and effective incident management for issues affecting customer operations. The manager leads support staff, coordinates technical escalations, and ensures customers receive clear updates from initial report through confirmed service restoration.

Key Responsibilities

Service Desk Leadership

Lead, hire, coach, and develop service desk staff; establish performance expectations and review ticket quality and customer interactions.

Manage schedules, staffing levels, shift handoffs, and escalation coverage to maintain continuous support, including nights, weekends, and holidays.

Own ticket intake, prioritization, assignment, follow-up, and closure; ensure accurate records, clear ownership, and compliance with service level agreements.

Maintain support procedures, knowledge articles, troubleshooting runbooks, and customer-specific escalation contacts.

Incident Management and Customer Communication

Lead incident triage and assess severity based on customer impact, operational urgency, and the scope of affected services.

Coordinate major incident response, including incident bridges, technical escalations, assigned actions, and timely engagement of Development, Infrastructure, Reliability, and third-party providers.

Provide accurate customer and leadership updates describing impact, response actions, workarounds, and next update times; communicate restoration estimates only when supported by the responding teams.

Track incidents through restoration, validate recovery with technical teams and affected customers, and document timelines, decisions, and resolution details.

Facilitate post-incident reviews and support root cause analysis; track corrective actions and recurring issues through completion.

Monitoring and Operational Improvement

Oversee alert intake and first-level investigation using Datadog and/or Azure monitoring and alerting tools; correlate alerts with customer reports and service impact.

Use dashboards, logs, and metrics to investigate application availability, queue depth, message processing delays, SQL health, and virtual machine performance.

Work with technical owners to improve alert thresholds, routing, escalation, and runbooks, reducing alert noise and missed incidents.

Report service performance and identify improvements using response time, restoration time, SLA attainment, backlog age, repeat incidents, and customer satisfaction.

Required Qualifications

Five or more years of experience in customer-facing technical support, service desk operations, or production application support, including at least two years leading a team.

Experience managing a 24×7 support operation, including staffing, shift handoffs, on-call escalation, and service level commitments.

Demonstrated incident management skills, including severity assessment, major incident coordination, customer communications, escalation, and service restoration.

Hands-on experience using Datadog and/or Azure Monitor, Azure alerts, Log Analytics, or Application Insights to review alerts, dashboards, logs, and service health.

Experience with an IT service management or ticketing platform and disciplined incident documentation, queue management, and reporting.

Working knowledge of SaaS applications, cloud environments, APIs, messaging systems, databases, and basic network troubleshooting sufficient to guide initial investigation and technical escalation.

Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical issues clearly to customers and business leaders.

Ability to prioritize under pressure, maintain accountability across teams, and make sound decisions during service disruptions.

Bachelor’s degree in information technology, business, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience supporting transportation, logistics, aviation, or other environments where service disruptions directly affect time-sensitive operations.

Experience with both Datadog and Azure monitoring tools, including alert tuning, dashboard development, and log queries.

ITIL Foundation certification or equivalent knowledge of incident, problem, change, and service management practices.

Experience building support teams, improving knowledge management, and introducing automation to reduce manual support effort.