Company / Location Information
A.O. Smith is a global leader applying innovative technologies and energy-efficient solutions to products manufactured and marketed worldwide. The company is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of residential and commercial water heating equipment and boilers, as well as a manufacturer of water treatment products for residential and light commercial applications. A. O. Smith is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with approximately 12,000 employees at operations in the United States, Canada, China, India, Mexico, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
Primary Function
The Customer Service Solutions Manager will lead the strategy, optimization, and modernization of customer service technologies and customer engagement platforms while overseeing a high-performing customer service organization. This role is responsible for driving improvements across contact center systems, customer routing, workflow automation, system integrations, and omnichannel support solutions, including chat, text messaging, and AI-enabled self-service tools. Serving as a key partner to IT, Engineering, Warranty, and Operations teams, the successful candidate will help enhance the customer experience, support enterprise-wide technology initiatives, and ensure customer service platforms effectively meet both business and customer needs. While the role includes leadership responsibilities, the primary focus is on customer service technology, process improvement, and contact center transformation.
Responsibilities
• Lead the strategy, management, and optimization of customer service and contact center technologies.
• Serve as the business owner for customer experience solutions, ensuring systems effectively support customer interactions across multiple channels.
• Manage a team of technical support professionals with a specific focus in the areas of call center operation, agent training, agent quality, call center analytics, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with IT teams to design, implement, and maintain system integrations, workflow automation, customer routing, and platform enhancements.
• Oversee call routing design, customer journey optimization, and service channel performance to ensure customers receive timely and effective support.
• Organizational Alignment - Aligns self and department(s) with company culture, company values (our company will be…) and organizational programs (AOSOS). Understands key requirements for building a multi-year business strategy
• Leadership - Provides guidance, understands priorities, and handles crisis driven events effectively. Motivate the team, show empathy, team building, diplomacy, accountability, organization, recognition, negotiating skills, and time management. Ensures all members of the group are working collaboratively towards a common goal. Empowers team members to make the right decisions in line with these goals. Conducts agenda driven meetings. Directs value added activities and drives out non value added activities.
• Workforce Management - Ability to clearly understand capacity planning with long range forecasting. Proven ability to manage short range forecasting including scheduling, staffing, and intra-day management.
• Quality - Able to guide an effective call center quality program. Provide direction to the quality team to deliver data driven metrics for driving improvement. Ensure calibrations are conducted to ensure quality scans are as consistent as possible. Ensure feedback from quality scores are provided to both leadership and training.
• Talent Acquisition - Oversees candidate selection, (in collaboration with HR). Working with training to provide onboarding training which includes developmental training based off of the most up to date position analysis.
• Budgeting- Creates/reviews departmental budget, forecasts future needs, manages monthly budget, justifies budget increases and looks for opportunities to decrease. Responsible for making merit and bonus recommendations.
• Carries out management responsibilities in accordance with the organization's policies and applicable laws.
Qualifications
• Bachelor's Degree in related field.
• 6+ years of experience leading/supervising customer service, contact center, technical support, or customer experience operations.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience managing customer service technology platforms such as Salesforce, Five9, Genesys, NICE, Amazon Connect, Zendesk, or similar customer engagement solutions.
• Demonstrated experience leading customer service technology implementations, system enhancements, or digital transformation initiatives.
• Experience partnering with IT teams to implement customer service systems, integrations, workflow automation, customer routing, and omnichannel support solutions.
• Strong understanding of contact center operations, customer experience management, workforce management, and customer engagement technologies.
• Experience evaluating, recommending, and implementing customer-facing technologies such as webchat, SMS/text messaging, AI self-service tools, chatbots, or other omnichannel solutions.
• Must possess excellent written and oral communication, and presentation skills.
• Demonstrated people-oriented management experience.
We Offer
Competitive compensation package and comprehensive benefits plans which include medical and dental insurance, company-sponsored life insurance, retirement security savings plan, short- and long-term disability programs and tuition assistance.
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ADA Statement & EEO Statement
In developing this job description care was taken to include all competencies needed to successfully perform in this position. However, for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) purposes, the essential functions of the job may or may not have been described for purposes of ADA reasonable accommodation. All reasonable accommodation requests will be reviewed and evaluated on a case-by-case basis. We consider all applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity and expression, marital or military status.
We also provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and applicable state and local law.