Manager, Escalations

Summary

Join Airbnb's Delivery team as a Customer Service Manager and lead a team providing exceptional support to our global community. You will oversee team operations, manage complex issues, and coach your team to deliver high-quality service. This role requires strong leadership, communication, and analytical skills, along with experience in customer service and team management. You will be responsible for performance management, staff development, and strategic planning. The position is remote-eligible in select Canadian provinces, with occasional office work possible. This role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact on a global scale.

Requirements

• 10+ years experience in a customer service or operations, with 5+ years in a role directly managing a team
• Exceptional leadership and team management skills to manage a team of professionals - comfort with conflict, giving and receiving feedback, and handling employee/Talent issues
• Strong communication skills to collaborate with different stakeholders and manage sensitive cases, while remaining calm and poised under pressure
• Organized and resourceful; able to juggle and multi-task, with an attention to detail and follow through even in ambiguous situations
• In-depth understanding of customer service operations and processes; able to translate that to your team
• Strategic thinking and problem-solving abilities to evaluate procedures and identify opportunities for improvement
• Ability to cascade with context and lead your team through changes
• Exceptional coaching skills, ability to tailor your feedback & communication style to meet the needs of your coachee or mentee
• Proficiency in various data analysis and reporting tools to track performance trends (tableau, SQL, Excel, Google Sheets, etc.)
• This position is Canada - Remote Eligible

Responsibilities

• Oversee a strong operational environment for your teams and ensure high quality support for the community from your team
• Manage the team execution of complex, sensitive, and/or urgent issues that might pose a significant risk to our brand or community, including acting as the highest escalation point for case consults and high level escalations from other stakeholders
• Meet with your direct reports regularly to review their work and provide high quality, behavior-based coaching; must be able to create a performance development strategy/plan for your service(s)
• Provide best practices guidelines to your team on how to handle cases and situations, and ensure that ways of working are documented and followed
• Ensure that the team is consistently staffed appropriately and that staff complete onboarding and ongoing trainings
• For cases that involve internal stakeholders, guide agents to take proper action to case closure and in rare cases, support with in-the-weeds case handling
• Collaborate with Capacity Planning & WFP on setting minimum headcount, ensuring adequate coverage, contingency planning impacts of changes, and advocating for staffing needs vs. volume/work
• Drive performance at the agent, team, and service level
• Ensure individual team members are held accountable to performance goals in a fair and equitable manner by setting clear expectations, following-up individually, and coaching team members positively to develop and improve their skills in a tailored way
• Manage both agent and team performance, including identifying trends in performance, providing corrective actions and positive overall feedback, and writing year end reviews and improvement plans
• Ability to set and articulate the vision and focus for the quarter; deliver that vision and focus through all hands-type meetings
• Share input and recommendations about service target setting
• Provide oversight on the overall service performance and contribute to reporting on trends and providing a holistic picture of the service to the Delivery Director
• Build and nurture an engaged and diverse team
• Own and manage end-to-end people strategy and operations within your agent team to foster a high performing and sustainable team environment. This includes hiring, driving onboarding, talent development, and people engagement/wellness/morale
• Enable team and individual professional success through supporting and challenging your team to meet and exceed expectations with clear goals/expectations, feedback, one-on-ones, and coaching
• Support team in professional development within team by finding and creating development opportunities and leveraging company-wide resources to regularly drive development within your team
• Keep up with day-to-day management duties such as time off approvals, team and one-on-one meetings, and managing Talent-related issues
• Maintain a culture of openness, transparency and accountability allowing our teams to deliver their best work while being themselves
• Demonstrate strong leadership on important issues including Diversity & Belonging, Allyship, Ethics, Compliance and maintaining high standards of service to the company
• Support strategic initiatives within Delivery and your service as needed
• Lead the team toward the successful execution of company or other strategic changes or goals within your service by cascading updates and changes, communicating new requirements, and providing feedback
• Support, as needed, internal Delivery performance & operations improvement projects, in collaboration with the Delivery Excellence team and cross-functional partners
• Think critically and constantly evaluate our procedures. Collect feedback from the team to identify opportunities to improve performance and better optimize processes for the team, service, and global community