Technical Services Manager

The mission of sonnen’s technical support team is to ensure every customer has an excellent experience by solving problems, educating customer, and helping to improve the quality of sonnen’s products and of our partners’ and customers’ experience.  

The Technical Services Manager is directly responsible for this mission by creating a strategy to provide excellent service, building and managing a team of customer service team leaders, customer service technicians, technical service reps, field service technicians, and outsourced technical support resources with the goal of providing excellent service to our partners and customers.  The Technical Services Manager is a management position, ultimately responsible for the performance of the technical services teams.  The Service Manager directly manages team leaders and strategically important individual contributors, tracking performance to agreed upon Objectives and Key Results using Key Performance Indicators, amongst other measurement tools.  The Service Manager supports the teams by identifying areas in which team members are underperforming and conducting training to improve performance, and managing team leaders’ bi-annual performance reviews.   The Technical Service Manager reports to the VP of customer Experience.  As a management role, the Technical Services Manager leads annual and quarterly planning and plays a key role in determining service department direction and strategy. 

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of technical support experience
• 3+ years of technical support management experience
• Experience in customer de-escalation techniques, 
• Experience managing a large team, day to day team management, and developing new employees
• Excellent telephone and Microsoft Office Suite experience
• Strong verbal and written interpersonal communication skills, with an ability to type at least 40 words per minute 
• Highly organized with the ability to clearly organize thoughts, schedules, reports, and databases
• Ability to understand complicated technical information and communicate such information to non-experts.
• Enthusiasm, creativity, and a desire to learn
• Intelligent, accountable, and self-assured mentality with a strong work ethic.
• Strong interests in technology, renewable energy, and or energy storage 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in a technical related field
• Working electrical knowledge and understanding of low voltage, AC/DC systems, and split-phase electrical power
• Experience in solar/battery storage industry
• Bi-lingual English/ Spanish speaking skills 
• Familiarity with Salesforce or equivalent Customer Resource Management tool

Key Responsibilities

• Identify department goals and set KPIs and Objectives for the team to hit
• Analyze data and KPIs collected by Technical Service team Leads 
• Conduct regular meetings with entire team to present goals and progress towards goals, and to understand any challenges the team is facing.
• Conduct training and coaching for the team, any new members to the team, and any team members who are not meeting performance goals.
• Make final decisions regarding escalated cases from the team, in support of Technical Service Team Leaders.  
• Manage escalated cases as projects to maximize customer satisfaction while protecting sonnen. 
• Conduct regular audits of team members, joining service calls and reviewing closed cases to ensure proper customer experience, accurate troubleshooting, and accurate record-keeping. 
• Take service calls and resolve cases at least once per month to keep up skills, test processes, and stay up to speed with market conditions.
• Participate in quarterly planning meetings with company leadership.   Understand and recommend improvements to processes and tools to help elevate the service team. 

Position Key Results and KPIs include:

• Key Result: Ensure team KPIs meets Technical Support Supervisor expectations 
  1. KPI: Track key team KPIs monthly, including, but not limited to, NPS, Customer Satisfaction, Time2Close and take immediate action to improve KPIs where they fall below expectations. 
• Key Result: Ensure excellent performance from all team members
  1. KPI: “shadow” each team member on a call, tracking from case origination to completion, once per month.  Provide feedback and coaching where necessary. 
• Key Result: Understand current processes and suggest improvements if necessary 
  1. KPI: Take and complete at least one case per week to test processes. 
• Key Result: Complete key “human resources” responsibilities for direct hires
  1. KPI: Complete performance and compensation reviews within 1 month of effective “due date” with support from Service Supervisor