Manager, Customer Support

Job Title: Manager, Customer Support

Location: Remote - US Only
Country: United States
Department: Support
Reports To: VP, Customer Support
Position Type: Full-Time
Salary: $100,000

Job Summary:

First Due is the leading cloud-native software platform for fire and EMS agencies in the United States. More than 3,000 agencies and 500,000 first responders rely on First Due every day for incident reporting, pre-incident planning, ePCR, scheduling, fire prevention, mobile response, training, and AI-powered analytics. We are FedRAMP High certified, power 42% of all national NERIS submissions, and count FDNY among our flagship customers.

Our Customer Support function is undergoing a major transformation. We are building a professionally scaled, data-driven organization with real infrastructure, real process discipline, and real career paths. This role is a critical part of that build.

We are looking for someone who has done this work before. Not at the strategic level. At the ground level. You have run a support queue, coached agents through hard tickets, built a QA program that changed behavior, and used data to figure out why the queue was growing before someone had to tell you. You have been the person in the room who knows how the operation actually works because you built the processes your team runs on.

This is not a maintenance role. We are building, and we need someone who knows what good looks like because they have built it themselves.

Key Responsibilities:

This role owns the daily execution and operational health of a support team, reporting to the VP of Customer Support. You will directly manage team leads and individual contributors, and you will be accountable for the performance, development, and output of your team against defined standards and KPIs.

Daily Operations and Queue Management

• Own the daily health of the support queue. Monitor ticket volume, aging, backlog growth, and routing accuracy. When something is off, you see it before anyone has to flag it.
• Ensure tickets are triaged correctly, assigned to the right agents, and worked to resolution within SLA targets. Enforce status discipline so the queue reflects reality, not aspiration.
• Manage escalations within the team. Know when a ticket needs to move up, when it needs a different skill set, and when an agent is stuck and needs coaching rather than reassignment.
• Run daily and weekly operational cadences: queue reviews, stand-ups, ticket audits, and backlog scrubs. These are not optional when they get busy. They are most important when they get busy.
• Act as a hands-on escalation point for complex or sensitive customer issues that exceed frontline capability.

Team Performance and Coaching

• Directly manage a team of support agents and team leads. Set clear expectations, deliver regular feedback, and hold the team accountable to defined performance standards.
• Own the QA and coaching cycle for your team. Review tickets regularly, identify patterns in agent performance, and run structured coaching sessions that connect feedback to specific behaviors.
• Track individual and team-level KPIs: CSAT, first response time, time to resolution, first contact resolution, ticket volume per agent, and quality scores. Use the data to drive coaching, not just reporting.
• Conduct regular 1:1s with every direct report. These are working sessions, not status meetings. The goal is development, unblocking, and honest feedback in both directions.
• Identify performance gaps early and address them directly. Build and execute performance improvement plans when necessary, with clear timelines and measurable criteria.

People Development and Team Health

• Own onboarding for new support team members. Build and maintain a structured ramp program that gets agents to competence on a defined timeline, not whenever it happens to click.
• Develop and maintain training materials, knowledge resources, and competency benchmarks for your team. When the product changes or a new module launches, your team is prepared before the tickets arrive.
• Identify high-potential individuals and invest in their development. Create visibility into what the next step looks like and what it takes to get there.
• Monitor team morale and workload distribution. Burnout is a leading indicator, not a trailing one. You are close enough to the team to see it early and act on it.
• Foster a culture of ownership and curiosity. The best support agents do not just close tickets. They understand why the ticket exists and whether it should exist at all.

Process Execution and Improvement

• Execute the support processes and standards defined by the Director. When a process is not working on the ground, surface it with data and a recommendation, not just a complaint.
• Maintain and enforce ticket classification discipline: module tagging, ticket type, priority, and status accuracy. Clean data starts with consistent agent behavior, and consistent agent behavior starts with management reinforcement.
• Identify recurring ticket patterns and escalation drivers within your team. Document them, quantify them, and bring them to leadership with enough context to act on.
• Contribute to process design and improvement initiatives. You are closest to how the work actually gets done, and your input is expected, not optional.
• Ensure that escalations leaving your team for Product or Engineering are well-documented, properly categorized, and include everything the receiving team needs to act without a follow-up conversation.

Reporting and Visibility

• Deliver weekly team performance reports that are accurate, on time, and actionable. Your Director should never have to ask you how your team is doing.
• Maintain clean, current data in the support platform. Ticket fields are filled correctly, statuses reflect actual state, and your team understands that data hygiene is part of the job, not extra work.
• Surface risks, blockers, and capacity concerns proactively. If the queue is growing, if a product release is generating unexpected volume, or if you are losing coverage, raise it before it becomes a crisis.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work with peer managers across Support, Customer Success, and Services to coordinate on shared customers, handoff points, and escalation paths.
• Partner with Product and Engineering contacts on escalated issues. Represent the customer problem clearly and follow through on resolution timelines.
• Participate in product release readiness activities. Review release notes, identify likely support impact, and prepare your team for what is coming.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience in customer support operations, with at least 2 years directly managing a team of 8+ support agents or specialists in a B2B SaaS environment.
• You have built or substantially improved a support operation. You did not inherit a well-running machine. You built the processes, set the standards, and developed the team that runs on them.
• Hands-on experience running a support queue: you have personally triaged tickets, coached agents through complex issues, and managed a backlog under pressure. You know what the work feels like, not just what the metrics say.
• Experience designing and running QA and coaching programs that changed agent behavior. You can point to specific examples where your coaching moved a metric, not just checked a box.
• Operational fluency with a modern support platform (Zendesk strongly preferred). You understand views, triggers, automations, macros, and reporting well enough to manage through the tool, not around it.
• Experience tracking and reporting on support KPIs (CSAT, FRT, TTR, FCR, ticket volume, quality scores). You have built or maintained a team scorecard and used it to drive decisions.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills. You can write a clear process document, deliver direct feedback in a 1:1, and present your team's performance to leadership without sugarcoating.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in mission-critical, compliance-sensitive, or government-adjacent B2B SaaS environments. Public safety, healthcare, infrastructure, or similar industries where errors have real-world consequences.
• Experience managing distributed or remote teams across multiple time zones.
• Familiarity with Jira or similar tools for tracking escalations to Product and Engineering teams.
• Experience building structured onboarding or training programs for support agents.
• Experience with workforce management fundamentals: scheduling, capacity planning, and coverage modeling.
• Background working alongside Customer Success and Implementation/Services teams with clearly defined handoff boundaries.