Vice President of Customer Support

About the Role
We are seeking an experienced Vice President of Customer Support to lead a global Level 1 support organization for a finance technology company delivering SaaS solutions to financial services customers. This leader will manage approximately 50 support professionals across application support, account support, data management support, implementation support, and configuration support.
The VP of Customer Support will be accountable for delivering a premium, responsive, and scalable customer support experience for tier 1 financial services organizations. The role requires strong operational discipline, deep understanding of support KPIs and SLAs, proven experience defining support contracts, and the ability to optimize Zendesk and AI-enabled workflows across a follow-the-sun global support model.

Responsibilities
Global Support Leadership

• Lead and develop a global Level 1 customer support organization of approximately 50 people across application support, account support, data management support, implementation support, and configuration support.
• Operate and continuously improve a follow-the-sun support model spanning the United States, Europe, APAC and South Africa
• Build a high-performance support culture focused on ownership, responsiveness, customer empathy, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.
• Ensure clear roles, responsibilities, escalation paths, and handoffs across support teams and adjacent functions.

Support Operations, KPIs, and SLAs

• Define, manage, and report on core support KPIs, including first response time, time to resolution, SLA adherence, ticket backlog, customer satisfaction, escalation rates, and quality metrics.
• Own the design and operational management of support SLAs across customer tiers, support packages, and internal support groups.
• Establish clear operating rhythms, dashboards, quality assurance processes, and management reviews to improve support performance and customer outcomes.
• Use data-driven insights to identify operational bottlenecks, improve workflows, reduce repeat issues, and increase first-contact or first-team resolution.

Support Contracts and Premium Support

• Define, refine, and operationalize customer support contracts, including standard and premium support offerings.
• Partner with Sales, Customer Success, Finance, and Legal to ensure support commitments are commercially sound, operationally achievable, and clearly measurable.
• Develop tiered support models that align service levels, response commitments, escalation paths, and customer value.
• Support executive-level customer conversations regarding support models, service commitments, escalations, and continuous improvement plans.

Zendesk Optimization and AI-Enabled Support

• Own the optimization of Zendesk as the central support platform, including ticket intake, forms, routing, queues, automations, triggers, reporting, knowledge base, and customer portal experience.
• Design workflows that ensure customer issues are routed quickly to the right team with the right context and are tracked through to resolution.
• Identify, evaluate, and implement AI tooling to improve support efficiency, including intelligent ticket classification, customer self-service, knowledge recommendations, quality review, customer sentiment analysis, and agent productivity.
• Ensure AI-enabled workflows are governed, measurable, secure, and aligned with the expectations of enterprise financial services customers.

Customer Engagement and Enterprise Support

• Ensure the support organization can confidently engage with and support tier 1 financial services organizations, including investment banks, asset managers, regulators, and other premium enterprise customers.
• Act as a senior escalation point for high-value customers and critical support issues.
• Develop customer-facing support practices that demonstrate professionalism, accountability, urgency, and deep understanding of enterprise financial services expectations.
• Partner with Customer Success and Account Management to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and confidence in the support experience.

People Development and Training

• Build a structured training and enablement program that equips support personnel to deliver superior service across product, process, communication, and customer engagement skills.
• Define career paths, skills matrices, progression plans, and coaching routines for support professionals and team leaders.
• Develop future leaders and technical specialists within the support organization.
• Ensure teams have the knowledge, tools, and confidence to troubleshoot complex SaaS application, account, data, implementation, and configuration issues.

Product and Engineering Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product Management and Engineering to ensure customer support insights are converted into actionable product improvements.
• Establish clear defect escalation, prioritization, communication, and resolution processes across Support, Product, and Engineering.
• Provide structured feedback on product usability, recurring customer pain points, configuration complexity, data issues, and supportability concerns.
• Ensure swift resolution of defects and transparent communication to customers and internal stakeholders.

Experience and Skills

• 10+ years of customer support, technical support, customer operations, or service delivery leadership experience, preferably in B2B SaaS or financial technology.
• 5+ years leading managers and geographically distributed support teams across multiple regions.
• Proven experience managing Level 1 support organizations supporting complex SaaS products for enterprise customers.
• Experience supporting financial services customers, ideally including tier 1 banks, investment banks, asset managers, regulators, or other highly regulated enterprise clients.
• Excellent executive communication skills, with the ability to engage credibly with premium enterprise customers and senior internal stakeholders.

Leadership Attributes

• Customer obsessed, commercially aware, and operationally disciplined.
• Comfortable leading transformation while maintaining high standards of day-to-day service delivery.
• Strong people leader who can coach managers, develop talent, and build clear career paths.
• Data-driven decision maker with the ability to convert metrics into practical operational improvements.
• Confident working in a high-expectation enterprise environment where responsiveness, trust, and communication are critical.
• Collaborative, transparent, and able to influence across functions without creating unnecessary complexity.

Measures of Success

• Improved first response time, time to resolution, SLA adherence, backlog management, and customer satisfaction.
• Clear support contract definitions and operating models for standard and premium support.
• Optimized Zendesk workflows, reporting, routing, customer portal experience, and AI-enabled support processes.
• Consistent follow-the-sun support execution across the United States, Europe, and India.
• Improved support quality, staff capability, career progression, and management effectiveness.
• Stronger collaboration between Support, Product Management, and Engineering, resulting in faster defect resolution and better product feedback loops.
• Greater confidence from premium financial services customers in the quality, reliability, and professionalism of the support organization.

About MCO (MyComplianceOffice)
MCO is a global leader dedicated to empowering Financial Services firms to manage compliance programs with ease and efficiency. Our mission is to foster a fair, transparent, and trusted financial environment worldwide by helping organizations meet their regulatory obligations to society.

At the heart of MCO’s offering is our unique, unified platform, which seamlessly integrates compliance monitoring and data into a single, comprehensive view. This holistic approach enables firms to maintain compliance across all internal systems, structures, and processes—ensuring peace of mind in an ever-evolving regulatory landscape.

Headquartered in Dublin, MCO has an international footprint, with offices in London, Singapore, Hyderabad, New York, Chicago, Fort Worth, Switzerland, South Africa, Slovenia, and the UAE. Since our founding in 2008, we have evolved from a specialist provider of “best of breed” employee compliance solutions to a pioneer in integrated compliance technology.

Today, our team of over 400 professionals supports more than 1.5 million users in 128 countries. Our diverse customer base includes small businesses, large enterprises, four of the world’s top ten asset managers, twenty of the top seventy-five global banks, and three of the top five investment banks for global M&A transactions.

Originally posted on Himalayas