Technical Support Manager
SparkMeter, Kenya
Job Description
This role is located in Kenya or Nigeria. Remote candidates will be considered for exceptionally well qualified applicants. All applicants must be in Africa
Context:
Sparkmeter is the leader in electricity metering hardware and software solutions in Africa and Central Asia. We have customers in over 30 countries.
This is a leadership role that will be focused on developing and enabling staff through system amp; process enhancements, knowledge sharing and problem solving.
The enabling leadership will be delivered by providing solutions to the Technical Support team needs through system amp; process enhancements, offering ideas, perspective, tools, training, coaching, problem solving all drawn from experience. The goal is to deliver best in class technical support and develop technical processes that empower our sales achievement.
We already have a team of tremendously talented Product Experts and Technical Support Engineers and they deserve world class leadership.
You will be the first point of escalation for your team and will work to solve problems. This will involve frequent calls and meetings with customers, travel as needed and will require exhibiting exemplary customer management, diplomacy, communication, and root cause problem solving. In addition, you will need to know and utilize the escalation paths available to you to overcome impediments and get the job done.
Deliverables:
- 30 Day Diagnostic. Take the first month to get to know our systems, processes and people. Understand their challenges and opportunities. Produce a diagnostic revealing the biggest improvement opportunities, a target future state for each and a roadmap to achieve the future state.
- Improve our Zendesk system to empower analysis. Mature our use of Zendesk and set it up so we can perform powerful analysis of our performance and find insights from that analysis that lead to future improvements. Create visibility through use of dashboards and dynamic reporting.
- Own and develop our Technical Support Program (systems and processes) ensuring the delivery of our sales targets. Have and maintain knowledge of what best in class customer support for Saas and device OEMs looks like and ensure we are at or better than anyone else.
- Build a winning team culture. Create a culture of accountability, speed to deliverable, fosters ownership, energizes and aligns the team to shared goals. Develop skills within your team so that you are always creating depth in capability.
- Envision and implement a team structure for our business. Based on Sparkmeter’s goals (including growth plans), strategies, industry, and geographic footprint, develop a Support resourcing plan that includes the roles, skills, locations and scale of the team needed to keep us just slightly ahead of where we need to be and when. Resource the team with personnel that are capable of successfully selling into our target markets. Staff the support roles necessary to ensure the success of the team.
- Collaborate with Sales leadership to define what account management means and who owns which parts of it.
- Complete a diagnostic looking specifically at what the Sales team needs from the Technical Support team to be successful and map a program to meet those needs
- Own and Project Manage Technical Product Root Cause Investigations of Outlier or trending issues your ticket system has revealed
- This will require the cross collaboration of other teams as needed, a basic level of project management and a basic understanding of the corrective action investigation process
- We have a tracking and analysis system that can substantiate that 99% (1% allowance for variability) of communications are on time to our defined customer communication guidelines
- We have a data capture system linked to customer tickets and that data is being used by the customer experience director to provide the below analytics:
- Categorization the issues by type (Hardware, Software, Set up, User, Environment, supplier non conformance)
- Calculate historical frequency of occurrence and distribution of failure type and causes
- Identify when a higher than usual frequency of failure Outlier is occurring and investigate to protect our Warranty (i.e Husk meter failures or Finlay DA-1000 failures)
- And be identifying other valuable insights in to performance from available data
- Defined the staffing needs for the Customer Experience team needed to support the EMDU business and have created alignment with leadership on the justification for each new role
- Modify our customer satisfaction system to allow customers to communicate a scale of satisfaction (1-5)- not just whether we solved their problem or not