Customer Service Manager (Remote, USA)

Description

Are you a customer-obsessed people-leader stuck in a boring industry? Are you tired of working in a high-turnover call center environment that is only focused on churning through calls? Would you like to integrate your love for motorsports with your passion for customer service? If this sounds like you, consider joining Apex as our Customer Service Manager.

About Apex

Apex is a leading provider of high-performance automotive wheels and accessories, catering to the motorsport and performance car enthusiast community. Our mission is to provide wheels that deliver real and measurable performance and to protect consumers from a misleading industry full of fashion-focused wheels. 

Objective

The Customer Service Manager is tasked with managing a small but passionate team of motorsports enthusiasts who are solving the day-to-day challenges of customer service. This role ensures customer support by developing and optimizing systems and processes, implementing new initiatives, and coaching and training staff. Your mission is to create an exceptional customer service experience while keeping team headcount at optimal levels.

Job Summary

Following the concepts of the book Raving Fans, you are managing and optimizing a department to create a seamless, timely, accurate, and efficient customer service experience while maintaining Apex’s authentic voice. The goal is to turn our customers into loyal brand advocates. We don’t have (and don’t want) a call center full of nameless customer service agents. There aren’t rows of stuffy cubicles at Apex. Our five Customer Service Specialists are genuine motorsports enthusiasts who have come to Apex because of their love for the industry. Their authentic enthusiasm for the space and desire to educate are critical aspects of a great customer experience. We have a separate team of highly adept Fitment Experts in Sales to assist customers with product selection and complex technical topics. The team you will manage is largely focused on the other aspects of the customer’s buying journey via incoming calls, emails and other forms of customer communication. 

You’ll be expected to analyze, optimize, and maybe even replace our tech stack based on your findings and our budget.  We want you to automate key systems to ensure that our team stays fairly lean as we grow and that we prioritize the right things. To ensure the long-term success of our team and their ability to function smoothly and independently, you’ll be tasked with building out internal resources, internal SOPs, and robust training for new hire onboarding. You’ll need to find ways to build in stop-gaps, alerts, and notifications to let the team know when there is a problem.  You’ll be expected to implement customer service quality and training initiatives that ensure the information and experience we provide to customers is authentic, accurate, and timely. A major part of this position will be working with your team to understand the most common questions that customers ask with the long-range goal of publishing customer-facing resources to improve the customer experience and minimize preventable customer inquiries.

This role requires someone who understands small and medium-scale customer service best practices, has a solid background in measuring contact center performance metrics, and has experience analyzing and implementing customer service technologies. You’ll need to be very analytical and someone who relies on data to make decisions. We’re not looking for someone who shoots from the hip and doesn’t measure performance. We’re at the mid-way point in our journey of establishing KPIs for this department. When you arrive, you’ll have some work to do in refining these measures and ensuring that our people and processes are achieving at or above customer service industry standards. Regular reporting of these KPIs to leadership is essential in helping leadership understand the health and effectiveness of the department.

Once you’re settled in, you’ll be leading the introduction of AI-based tools to supercharge our Customer Service team. This team hasn’t used AI in a significant capacity before and so we’re striving to creatively implement AI to keep our overhead and product prices low while maintaining our authentic voice. This means that you’ll either need experience directly implementing AI solutions or will need to be extremely comfortable charting unknown territory, assessing needs, system capabilities, and implementing AI solutions that scale. Before we hire any new talent into the department, we’ll expect you to rigorously investigate whether AI solutions could solve the problem.

As we serve a passionate enthusiast community, we’re looking for a candidate who either has a solid understanding of the high-performance automotive space or is eager to learn. The key is ensuring we remain authentic in our interactions. While prior experience in the aftermarket performance industry isn’t required, we do expect you to bring a genuine enthusiasm for customer service and be deeply engaged with our customers.

Our current Customer Experience Manager is transitioning to a new role within Apex and will be available to support you throughout the handover process. We expect this transition to take around 90-120 days. We’re seeking someone who is truly passionate about delivering an exceptional customer service experience and is ready to make Customer Service their long-term career.

The customer service team should meet in person semi-annually and you’ll be responsible for planning events to build team camaraderie. You should also anticipate occasional travel (possibly quarterly) to our headquarters in Pleasanton, CA, for leadership summits. 

This position is salaried and is exempt from overtime. The Customer Service team works Monday through Friday, 8:30AM – 5PM PST and so you should anticipate being available primarily during these core hours.

Who are you?

• Customer satisfaction isn’t just a metric to you – it’s a reflection of your team’s excellence. 
• You believe that great customer experiences aren’t left to chance – they’re engineered through smart systems, clear expectations, and well-trained teams. 
• Leading a team is one of the “must-haves” on your wish list. You enjoy coaching and mentoring and find satisfaction in helping others grow.
• You value stability and consistency over rapid progression in job titles and responsibility.
• You view change as a necessary challenge and are excited to ideate, implement, and drive initiatives within your department.

How to apply

In your cover letter, tell us about your experience implementing new technologies for Customer Service teams to enhance the customer experience. What series of events led to the need to implement a new piece of technology? What was your specific role in the initiative? Would you do anything differently next time? If you are a motorsports enthusiast, we’d love to hear about what fuels your passion in the industry.

Responsibilities

• Own the customer service experience: Define and implement strategies to improve the overall customer service experience. Manage large-scale customer contact interactions related to order updates, pre-orders, quality control, and other initiatives. Responsible for responding to escalated customer inquiries. Delegate responsibilities to your team so you can focus on the bigger picture and ensure redundancy across the department. In the near future, appoint and train a Lead Customer Service Agent to handle escalated customer inquiries. Stay updated on industry best practices and emerging trends to ensure the company remains at the forefront of customer-centric strategies.
• Leverage technology to turn customers into Raving Fans at scale: Develop a plan for growth and scalability related to customer service and order fulfillment – planning for company growth to $100M in revenue by 2030. Work with our e-Commerce department to enhance the user experience on the company’s website, applications, and other digital touchpoints. Identify pain points in the post-purchase customer journey and oversee the implementation of solutions to address them, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Implement project management software within customer service to facilitate, track, and identify ROI on projects and initiatives. 
• People-Management: Manage and mentor the teams responsible for customer service and order processing & fulfillment while fostering an engaged, communicative and customer-centric culture. Utilize your relationship with customer service specialists to proactively identify pain points in the customer experience, including website issues, product quality issues, and more. Analyze headcount needs. Interview, hire, train, mentor, performance manage, promote, incentivize and exit staff. Plan and orchestrate teambuilding events, either at our HQ in Pleasanton, CA or at other off-site locations. 
• Measure individual and department success: Set, monitor, report, analyze, and improve upon department-level and team member KPIs using best practices and industry standards. Utilize those KPIs to provide performance-based coaching tailored to individual team members. Generate regular reports to inform the rest of upper management about the impact of your strategies on customer satisfaction, retention, revenue, and more. 
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Ensure that the processes, handoffs, and collaboration between the sales, supply chain and other teams are aligned and seamless. Oversee the order processing & fulfillment function, working alongside our supply chain team to foster relationships with our 3PL and shipping carriers. Collaborate with the eCommerce and supply chain team to ensure accurate and up-to-date product information and ETAs are available to customers. Work alongside our engineering and supply chain teams to identify systemic QC issues and help develop solutions to those problems. Work with sales, engineering and production teams to provide customer feedback and insights that contribute to product enhancements and innovations. 

About the Work Environment

While performing the duties of this job, the employee may be regularly required to stand, sit, talk, hear, reach, stoop, kneel, and use hands and fingers to operate a computer, telephone, and keyboard. Ability to sit at a computer terminal for an extended period. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision requirements due to computer work. Regular, predictable attendance is required. You’ll have a high degree of control over your working environment, as you’ll be primarily working from your home office.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration or another relevant field.
• 5+ years of experience in Customer Service Management in B2C businesses.
• 5+ years of experience implementing department and individual level KPIs  (CSAT, NPS, Response times) and using that data to drive decision-making and department strategy.
• 5+ years of experience in people management, including interviewing, hiring, training, mentoring, and developing staff.
• Experience implementing and managing customer service technologies, such as CRM systems, internal knowledge management systems, ticketing platforms, chat systems, and automation tools.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams to improve the overall customer experience.
• Knowledge of order processing and fulfillment within a 3PL environment is preferred.
• Experience with project management software, ideally Click-Up, is preferred.
• We’ll give strong preference to candidates with experience implementing external knowledge bases and FAQs for customer consumption.
• We’ll give strong preference to candidates who are motorsports enthusiasts, as you will innately understand what our customers want and the challenges they face when making purchases.
• Strong analytical skills with experience in data-driven decision-making, performance metrics (e.g., CSAT, NPS, response times), and process optimization.
• Exceptional people-management skills.
• Deep understanding of customer experience best practices, with a track record of improving satisfaction, efficiency, and retention.

Benefits

• Base annual salary between $80,000 – $100,000 depending on experience and location
• Work from home, anywhere in the contiguous US
• 100% Apex-paid employee medical, dental, and vision benefits with buy-up options
• Robust company contributions towards dependent medical benefits
• 401k with employer matching
• Paid vacation leave

• Paid sick Leave
• Paid holidays
• Professional development assistance
• A flexible working environment where work/life integration is encouraged
• Support your track addiction with reimbursements for HPDE and autocross event registration fees
• Eligibility for the SEMA college grant and loan forgiveness program
• Casual in-office dress environment where T-shirts, jeans, and shorts are welcome
• Employee discounts and freebies on Apex products and swag
• Participate in company activities including karting, spectating at races, track days, and more