Customer Support Manager

Support volume for this brand went from about 1,000 conversations a month at the start of last year to over 17,000 in the last 30 days. That growth isn't slowing down. They need someone who can build the team, the process, and the AI layer to match it, not just keep pace with the queue.

WHO THEY ARE

This is a fast-growing direct-to-consumer brand in the cookware space, best known for a titanium product line. They run support through Richpanel with an AI agent already handling part of the frontline volume, and order management through Shopify. The team is distributed internationally, with 18 agents, fielding 500 to 750 new tickets a day and climbing.

• Explosive month-on-month growth, still early in scaling support to match

• AI-first support operation already live, not theoretical

• Direct ownership of team, tooling, KPIs, and the feedback loop into product

This is a full‑time, remote contractor role supporting a team in the CET timezone.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU

• Full ownership of the function: you own the team, the tooling, the AI layer, the KPIs, and the feedback loop into product. Nobody else is running this.

• Build on top of a live AI agent: you're not evaluating vendors, you're expanding and tuning automation that's already handling real volume in Richpanel.

• Direct line into product: your ticket data and root-cause work feed straight into product, marketing, and checkout decisions, with revenue impact attached.

• Room to shape the reporting layer from scratch: you get to build the system that finally makes root-cause work fast and trustworthy.

WHAT YOU’RE GETTING YOURSELF INTO

• Lead and coach a distributed international team of reps and team leads across time zones, including building coverage that survives a December running at more than double a normal month

• Own CSAT end to end: set the real baseline, then run a quarterly plan to move it from 3.75 toward 4.5 and beyond

• Bring the same rigor to NPS, first response time, first-contact resolution, and Customer Effort Score

• Expand what the AI agent handles in Richpanel without losing quality, defining escalation and handoff rules and tracking AI and human performance as separate cohorts

• Fix the tag taxonomy and build automated tagging and sentiment analysis the team can actually trust in a weekly report

• Turn recurring ticket patterns into evidence-based briefs for product, marketing, and checkout owners, with revenue impact attached, and follow them through to a fix

WHO YOU ARE

• You have 5+ years in customer service within ecommerce, including managing a team

• You've implemented an AI agent or support automation in a live helpdesk, something you launched, tuned, and held to a quality bar, not just evaluated

• You have a strong command of CX metrics: CSAT, NPS, first response time, CES, first-contact resolution, cost per contact

• You've managed a distributed international team across time zones and channels

• You've worked with Shopify and DTC order flows, comfortable reconciling order data against tickets

• Your written English is excellent, since you're setting the tone for every customer reply

Bonus if you've:

• Used Richpanel, or Gorgias, Zendesk, or Kustomer at similar volume

• Supported 15,000+ conversations a month, including seasonal peaks

• Run social-first support, where the conversation happens in public

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

By day 30: baselines documented and instrumented, 1:1s done with the whole team, and the top ten contact drivers quantified under a tagging scheme you trust.

By day 60: revised AI scope and escalation rules live, and two upstream defect briefs delivered with impact attached.

By day 90: CSAT measurably up against baseline, agreed SLAs in place, and a Q4 peak plan built before the season starts.