Director, Partner Support

About EAB

At EAB, our mission is to make education smarter and our communities stronger. We harness the collective power of 1,600+ schools, colleges, and universities to uncover and apply proven practices and transformative insights. And since complex problems require multifaceted solutions, we work with each school differently to apply these insights through a customized blend of research, technology, and services. From kindergarten to college and beyond, EAB partners with education leaders, practitioners, and staff to accelerate progress and drive results across three key areas: enrollment management, student success, and institutional operations and strategy.

At EAB, we serve not only our partners but each other—that’s why we are always working to make sure our employees love their jobs and are invested in their community. See how we’ve been recognized for this dedication to our employees by checking out our recent awards.

For more information, visit our Careers page.

This role has the potential to be located either in our DC or Birmingham office. While remote candidates will be considered, there is a strong preference for this role to be located in our DC office.

The Role in Brief:

Director, Partner Support

The Director, Partner Support role is responsible for leading the broader Partner Support team within Technology Partner Success. The Partner Support team responds to end user questions, issues, or training needs about our technology products and coordinates communication and troubleshooting with internal teams. In order to help the team provide greater customer support, the candidate must be an excellent communicator, combining the ability to lead and coach Support Associates, balance meaningful customer interactions, readily shift priorities, monitor and report on performance, and work on support center initiatives while ensuring that service level and quality objectives are achieved.

The successful candidate will have a demonstrated record of creating and driving data-driven customer service strategies which have positively impacted customer satisfaction as well as met organizational and operational objectives. This position will track and report on key performance metrics such as response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction, and ticket reduction. Candidates should have a passion for customer service, spirit of generosity with both colleagues and partners, and excitement to tackle any challenge. Candidates must consistently take initiative and display a high level of proactivity and independence in their work.

Primary Responsibilities:

Primary responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following.

• Manage work activities of the Support Associates, including ticket management, problem solving, partner relationships, defining/following internal support processes, collaboration with internal teams. This management is across multiple locations.
• Understand technology capabilities in order to externally teach functionality and internally troubleshoot.
• Provide 24/7 customer support by managing overnight and weekend contractor work. This includes training contractors, monitoring quality performance, customer satisfaction, and vendor contract/invoice management.
• Lead staff in the continuing effort toward optimum performance, resource utilization, and cost-effectiveness.
• Continuously monitor and evaluate Support Associate performance and coach towards improvement.
• Meet monthly key support team performance goals for productivity (throughput), quality (customer satisfaction and internal quality assurance), elimination (process improvement), and other key performance metrics.
• Motivate and empower your entire team to reach their goals.
• Develop and implement guidelines, policies, and procedures for effective and high-quality customer support.
• Inspire confidence by setting direction, displaying integrity, and moving toward team goals.
• Work with various internal and external teams to develop more robust self-service help desk functionality for the organization.
• Oversee and help manage user support programs dedicated to serving our platform administrators through webinars, office hours, documentation, and training.
• Use customer support data to advocate, on behalf of customers and internal teams, development team and product team priorities.
• Develop and implement department-wide customer service training programs.
• Work with the senior Partner Success leadership teams to forecast, hire, retain, and support a Partner Support team that loves coming to work each day.
• Act as administrator for customer support platform. This includes workflow set up, maintenance, integrations, and vendor invoicing. In addition, learn, support, and manage internal JIRA ticket workflow and processes as JIRA administrator.
• Manage planned and unplanned platform downtime procedures and communication both internally and externally.
• Perform other related duties as assigned to ensure effective and efficient operation of the Partner Support team and improve the customer experience with EAB Technology.

Basic Qualifications

• Minimum of 3+ years’ experience working in a customer support center function
• Minimum of 3+ years manager experience, with a team of 5 or more
• Extensive experience interacting with partners and providing exceptional customer service, with a focus on attention to detail
• 2+ years’ experience in project and client management
• Proven multi-tasking skills in a fast-paced and challenging environment
• Bachelor’s degree
• Effective interpersonal and communication skills
• Critical thinking and an ability to creatively solve complex issues
• Willingness to travel less than 10% and a valid driver’s license

Ideal Qualifications

• Experience working in 24×7 support operations and with teams across multiple locations
• Extensive expertise in developing metrics to measure the effectiveness of technical support within the organization
• Solid leadership experience and an understanding of the dynamics involved in team leadership, particularly for distributed teams
• Experience facilitating and managing organizational change
• Experience with ZenDesk, JIRA, and Salesforce

Benefits:

Consistent with our belief that our employees are our most valuable resource, EAB offers a competitive and inclusive benefits package.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance; dependents and domestic partners eligible
• 401(k) retirement plan with company match
• 20+ days of PTO annually, in addition to paid firm holidays
• Daytime leave policy for community service or fitness activities (up to 10 hours a month each)
• Paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents
• Phase Back to Work program for employees returning from parental leave
• Infertility treatment coverage and adoption or surrogacy assistance
• Wellness programs including gym discounts and incentives to promote healthy living
• Dynamic growth opportunities with merit-based promotion philosophy
• Benefits kick in day one, see the full details here.

At EAB, we believe that to fulfill our mission to “make education smarter and our communities stronger” we need team members who bring a diversity of perspectives to the table and a workplace where each team member is valued, respected and heard.

To that end, EAB is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and we make employment decisions on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need. We don’t discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status or any other basis covered by appropriate law.