Customer and operational performance
- Lead a large, multi-tiered Product Support organization through a management team, with accountability for customer experience, service performance, employee engagement, and operating execution.
- Establish clear operating standards and use data to manage performance across customer satisfaction, first-contact resolution, resolution time, case quality, handoffs, repeat contacts, escalation trends, backlog health, and productivity.
- Improve customer outcomes by reducing unnecessary case movement, strengthening ownership and communication, and ensuring teams resolve issues with speed, accuracy, and appropriate urgency.
- Diagnose performance gaps through data, customer feedback, and direct observation; distinguish isolated issues from systemic problems; and lead timely corrective action.
- Create and sustain an operating rhythm that surfaces emerging risks early, drives root-cause action, and holds leaders accountable for measurable improvement.
- Engage directly with customers and senior customer stakeholders, including in escalated situations, to restore confidence, resolve complex issues, and represent the customer perspective internally.
- Partner with Support Operations on staffing, capacity, productivity, location, and vendor performance decisions, providing the operating insight required to make sound tradeoffs.
- Lead, coach, and develop directors, managers, and emerging leaders; set clear expectations for ownership, decision quality, customer focus, and execution.
- Build a high-performance culture that balances rigorous accountability with coaching, recognition, inclusion, and career development.
- Assess organizational capability and talent health; make difficult personnel decisions when performance or leadership behavior does not meet the required standard.
- Recruit, develop, and retain leaders who can operate effectively in a complex, customer-facing, global environment.
- Create succession depth and a durable leadership bench capable of sustaining performance through change, growth, and evolving customer needs.
- Operate effectively in a highly matrixed environment, building strong working relationships with Product, Engineering, Customer Experience, Services, Relationship Management, Support Operations, and global support leaders.
- Convert customer contacts, support trends, escalations, and voice-of-customer insights into clear product, process, supportability, and readiness actions.
- Partner with Product and Engineering to improve support readiness, prioritize recurring customer-impact issues, reduce avoidable demand, and close feedback loops.
- Influence peers and senior leaders with a clear, data-backed point of view, even when the required action sits outside the Product Support organization.
- Collaborate closely with Pune leadership and third-party partners to promote consistent standards, effective handoffs, and a cohesive customer experience across the support network.
- 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in customer support, technical support, customer experience, or service operations within enterprise SaaS or technology organizations.
- Demonstrated experience leading leaders in a large, multi-layered support organization of at least 100 employees.
- Experience leading in a global or highly matrixed organization, with a record of influencing outcomes across functions, geographies, and organizational boundaries.
- Proven record of materially improving customer satisfaction, first-contact resolution, resolution time, case quality, backlog health, productivity, or other core support outcomes.
- Strong operational and analytical acumen, including the ability to use data to identify performance drivers, make sound tradeoffs, and communicate an actionable point of view.
- Demonstrated leadership in customer escalations and experience engaging senior customer stakeholders in complex situations.
- Strong executive presence, written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to influence VP-level and senior cross-functional leaders.
- Demonstrated ability to develop leaders, set high standards, manage underperformance decisively, and build an engaged, accountable culture.
- Ability to work in a hybrid office environment in accordance with UKG's location and work-policy requirements. 3 days a week in either Lowell MA, Weston FL or Atlanta GA.
- Experience at the Senior Director level, or equivalent scope, with at least three years of senior-director leadership experience; alternatively, at least five years of director-level leadership experience managing a comparably large and complex organization.
- Experience in HCM, payroll, time and labor, workforce management, or a similarly complex enterprise SaaS domain.
- Experience managing or partnering closely with third-party support providers or business-process outsourcing partners.
- Demonstrated experience leading successful adoption of AI-enabled support capabilities, such as agent assist, intelligent triage and routing, knowledge retrieval, case summarization, quality automation, or coaching tools.
- Experience working with support platforms, CRM or case-management systems, voice-of-customer data, operational dashboards, and customer-experience measurement.
- Experience applying continuous-improvement methods such as Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, ITIL, or an equivalent discipline.