
Escalation Manager
Smartcat
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: Spain
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About the role
- Serve as the primary customer-facing owner of escalations, ensuring customers feel informed, supported, and confident throughout the resolution process
- Act as a strong customer advocate internally by translating business impact, urgency, and expectations into clear action plans and priorities
- Ensure communications are clear, timely, empathetic, and solution-oriented, reinforcing trust during high-pressure situations
- Drive a consistent, high-quality escalation experience by setting expectations, aligning on next steps, and maintaining transparency
- Own the end-to-end lifecycle of escalations from intake through resolution, ensuring compliance with SLAs, contractual obligations, and internal quality standards
- Drive progress through structured execution, strong accountability, and effective stakeholder coordination
- Monitor escalation timelines and SLA performance, proactively identifying risks and implementing mitigation strategies to maintain delivery commitments
- Escalate internally as needed to secure prioritization, alignment, resources, or decisions required to achieve customer outcomes
- Lead cross-functional collaboration across Engineering, Product, Support, Operations, and leadership teams to deliver timely resolutions
- Establish escalation action plans with clear milestones, owners, priorities, and delivery timelines
- Facilitate escalation operating rhythms (triage calls, war rooms, executive updates) to ensure momentum, clarity, and alignment
- Track progress, risks, and dependencies and remove blockers to maintain forward movement and resolution certainty
- Provide clear and consistent status updates to customers and internal stakeholders, including executive-ready summaries when required
- Ensure customers understand impact, progress, expected timelines, and resolution plans in business-friendly language
- Maintain escalation documentation, including customer communications, decision logs, action tracking, and final outcomes
- Support internal reporting and insights to improve escalation transparency and operational visibility
- Partner with internal teams to support issue triage, root cause analysis, and corrective/preventative action planning
- Lead post-resolution reviews focused on both technical outcomes and customer experience learnings
- Identify recurring patterns, systemic risks, or operational gaps impacting customers and drive improvements to prevent future escalations
- Contribute to improving escalation frameworks, playbooks, processes, and customer communication standards.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience in customer escalation management, customer success, technical support operations, program/project management, or related disciplines
- Proven ability to manage complex, high-severity escalations while maintaining strong customer experience, communication and SLA outcomes
- Strong customer-facing communication skills, including experience engaging with senior customer stakeholders
- Strong internal communication skills with internal stakeholders at all levels
- Demonstrated ability to implement AI tools and techniques to reduce total time to resolution while enhancing customer experience. Candidates should be comfortable leveraging AI to optimize efficiency, automate decision-making, and drive measurable improvements in service delivery
- Experience supporting AI-enabled products, platforms, or workflows
- Creating reporting on KPI and metric results and implementing improvement plans to meet KPI goals
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence outcomes without direct authority
- Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities and deliver results under pressure
- Ability to balance urgency, empathy, and operational discipline in high-impact situations.
Benefits
- Fully remote team
- Be part of an AI Native Organization
- Innovating a $100 Billion industry
- Join the rocketship to scale-up 10x and beyond together
- Smartcat Culture: Where Diversity Meets High Performance
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
customer escalation managementtechnical support operationsprogram managementproject managementAI tools implementationKPI reportingroot cause analysisaction planningprocess improvementescalation frameworks
Soft Skills
customer advocacycommunication skillsorganizational skillsstakeholder coordinationempathyaccountabilityproblem-solvinginfluence without authoritytime managementhigh-pressure decision making