Director, Advocacy Operations & Enterprise Incident Management

Key Responsibilities 

Incident Management 

• Own enterprise incident management processes and governance and lead the team of Incident Managers  

• Serve as the enterprise incident command function for all classes of incident, regardless of the function in which the incident originates.

• Quarterback the incident bridge: activate the response, convene the right responders at the right level of seniority, assign incident roles including commander, scribe, communications lead, and resolver owner, and drive the bridge to decisions, actions, and closure.

• Maintain the activation model, on-call rosters, and escalation trees that ensure the correct individuals join the bridge within defined response times.

• Establish a unified severity taxonomy, response frameworks, communication standards, and executive reporting that apply consistently across incident types, so that a given severity level means the same thing whether the event is an outage, a security breach, or a site evacuation.

• Drive customer-facing coordination during critical service events. 

• Coordinate incident communications with Corporate Communications, Legal, and Support across internal, customer, and, where required, regulatory audiences.

• Establish severity definitions, response frameworks, communication standards, and executive reporting. 

• Drive post-incident reviews and corrective action plans. 

Executive Escalations

• Manage executive-level customer escalations from initiation through resolution.

• Act as the single operational owner coordinating cross-functional response teams.

• Ensure executives have clear visibility into customer impact, recovery actions, and commitments.

Operational Excellence

• Develop standardized playbooks, workflows, and operating rhythms. 

• Implement reporting to identify systemic causes of escalations and incidents. 

• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce recurring issues. 

Business Continuity and Crisis Readiness

• Own the enterprise incident response playbooks for each incident class, developed jointly with the accountable functional owner.

• Run tabletop exercises and simulations across incident classes on a defined annual cycle, and convert the findings into playbook and readiness improvements.

• Maintain the readiness of the command structure, including rosters, contact trees, bridge infrastructure, and incident tooling.

• Interface with the crisis management team and executive staff during high-severity events.

Operational Excellence

• Develop standardized playbooks, workflows, and operating rhythms.

• Implement reporting to identify systemic causes of escalations and incidents.

• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce recurring issues.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with Customer Success, Support, Product, Engineering, Sales, and Renewal teams. 

• Influence prioritization of systemic customer-impacting issues. 

• Escalate organizational barriers preventing timely customer resolution. 

Measures of Success

• Reduction in repeat incidents.

• Reduction in executive escalations.

• Time to resolution for critical incidents.

• Time to executive response.

• Time to bridge activation, and time to full assembly of the required responders at the required seniority.

• Incident command coverage: the percentage of qualifying incidents run under the formal command model.

• Communications timeliness against severity-defined service levels, across internal, customer, and regulatory audiences.

• Exercise and tabletop completion rate across incident classes.

• Percentage of critical accounts successfully recovered.

• Customer satisfaction following escalation resolution.

• Corrective action completion rate.

• Reduction in escalations attributable to preventable operational issues.

Experience

• 10+ years of experience in Customer Success, Support, Customer Operations, Incident Management, Escalations, or related customer-facing functions.  

• 5+ years leading managers and building high-performing teams in a SaaS, technology, telecommunications, or subscription business environment.  

• Proven success leading executive escalations, major incidents, customer recovery programs, and cross-functional operational teams.  

• Experience building scalable operating models, governance frameworks, KPIs, and executive reporting.  

• Demonstrated ability to hire, coach, develop, and retain leaders while building succession plans and leadership bench strength.  

• Strong executive presence with the ability to influence Product, Engineering, Sales, Success, and Support leaders.  

• Ability to balance customer advocacy, employee development, and business outcomes in high-pressure environments.  

• Experience with Salesforce, customer success platforms, service management tools, and operational analytics preferred.  

• Track record of improving organizational performance, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence.