Director of Customer Support

Overview

For nearly thirteen years, Shopify has focused on helping grow businesses around the world. The heart of our success lies in the trust and relationships that we build with our merchants and our team. In the past six years we’ve grown from a single Support Guru in Ottawa to a team of over 1,200 Customer Success Gurus in Canada, Ireland and Manila. Our team supports a growing international community of merchants 24/7/365 on phones, chat, email and a variety of social platforms. The rocketship isn’t slowing down. Our team is made up  of strategic, agile, and caring leaders that work together to constantly improve the experience for our merchants with Shopify Support. We are looking for someone with ambition and vision that matches ours to lead our Canadian Support team. We want to build a company where our team is encouraged and challenged to improve everyday.

We’re hiring a Director of Support for Canada to join our team in developing strategy and contributing to the innovation of the worlds of support and customer success. At Shopify, you’ll never hear “because that’s how other companies do it”. You’ll be constantly challenged to re-think and evolve your ideas. We need to ensure as a team that we’re always building for the future. As a member of our leadership team, you will develop and execute overall merchant success strategy and grow the team to support it. This role is critical in ensuring we are doing the best for our team working for Shopify in Canada.

About our team: Our Support team is over 95% remote. When we first started our remote team nearly 4 years ago, we focused on hub cities to create communities of Shopify Gurus. You’ll be working with people in all of our hubs, so it’s vital you’re comfortable with the work-from-home lifestyle. Should you be based outside of Ottawa, it will be necessary to commit to travel on a quarterly basis at the very least.

You’ll work alongside other support leaders in the strategic planning and optimization of workforce planning, budgets, growth forecasting, recruitment, team engagement and operational improvements – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What we think we’re looking for: Ideally we are looking for someone who has experience leading an internationally renowned team and previous experience in a rapidly growing environment. You’re acutely focused on creating value for both our customers and company. This materializes both in revenue and growth of long term customers. Previous work in a support or sales environment would be a significant benefit in joining this team. You’re motivated by helping customers succeed. You’re driven by prospective customers and their potential to grow with our organization.

Relevant experience for the role:

• You have a compelling vision for customer experience. You’re not afraid to try new things, take risks and manage change with team engagement front of mind. Your decisions are informed by how to best impact our customers’ success.
• You’re team focused. The leaders that will join your team have extraordinary experience within Shopify and beyond. Working together will help everyone grow faster and get the best result. You’re driven to engage, grow and manage an incredibly talented team.
• You have a startup mindset. Shopify values the philosophies and culture that got us to the size of company we are today.
• You’ve lived, seen some things, you need to be flexible but can use those experiences as opportunities for us to improve.
• You’re excited about learning, growing and innovating quickly – everyday! Ship fast and iterate. Clear vision, vague plan.
• You believe that successful organizations leverage the knowledge and skill set of the teams that speak to their customers the most.
• Collaboration is not your buzzword, it’s your bloodline. You’ll connect with many different teams across the organization weekly, at a minimum.
• Your trust battery runs high and strong. You excel at relationship building and inform your decisions through data and intuition.
• Humor is It’s ok if only you think you’re funny. We can work with that!

Some of the work you’ll do with the Support Team:

• Work with other executives and leaders in Support to develop and share the longer-term vision for support.
• Use data to inform decisions, discover opportunities and share trends in both improvement and opportunities to improve.
• Work with the leadership team to understand and prioritize what concepts, processes and products work best for adoption, conversion, revenue generation and loyalty.
• The general managerial stuff that comes along with managing a team of 6+ direct reports representing a  team of more than 1000 people!
• Quarterly financial reviews, budget creation, spinning up new projects, acting as the executive sponsor for projects.

Tell us about yourself:

• Why have you built a career in Customer Success?
• Share an experience when you assisted a new customer in overcoming a challenge and were grateful for your contribution to their success.
• What is one customer service experience that had a lasting impact on you.
• How you’ve influenced change in your previous organizations, your leadership style and a few of your core values that drive your unique approach to solving problems.

Location: You’ll need to be located within Canada. Preference is for someone in or nearby Ottawa, Toronto or Vancouver.  Toronto or Vancouver locations would be remote

Please address your cover letter to Dustin.

Experience comes in many forms, many skills are transferable, and passion goes a long way. If your experience is this close to what we’re looking for, consider applying. We know that diversity of thought makes for the best problem-solving and creative thinking, which is why we’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage everyone to apply.