The Customer Escalation Lead is a senior individual contributor responsible for protecting customer confidence, managing strategic customer relationships, and driving the successful resolution of high-impact customer escalations. This role serves as the primary point of coordination for the organization’s most strategic accounts and executive-visible customer situations, ensuring escalations receive timely attention, clear ownership, proactive communication, and coordinated cross-functional support.

The Customer Escalation Lead acts as a trusted customer advocate and strategic partner across Customer Support, Product Health, Engineering, Product Management, and Customer Success. As a senior member of the Customer Health organization, this role owns complex customer escalations from intake through resolution and customer confirmation, while proactively identifying account risks, strengthening executive relationships, and amplifying the Voice of the Customer throughout the organization. This is an individual contributor role with significant cross-functional influence and no direct reports.

Core Responsibilities

Strategic Account Ownership & Customer Confidence

•     Serve as the primary customer advocate and escalation resource for an assigned portfolio of the organization's most strategic customer accounts.

•     Develop and maintain deep knowledge of assigned accounts — operational workflows, platform usage, customer priorities, active initiatives, support history, and organizational relationships.

•     Establish trusted relationships with customer stakeholders and serve as a consistent point of contact during high-impact situations.

•     Conduct regular account reviews and customer touchpoints to proactively identify concerns, opportunities, and risks.

•     Reinforce customer confidence through proactive engagement, responsiveness, transparency, and follow-through.

Customer Escalation Management

•     Own the end-to-end lifecycle of customer escalations from intake through resolution and customer confirmation.

•     Ensure all escalations maintain clear ownership, documented action plans, communication cadence, and executive visibility as appropriate.

•     Lead customer-facing escalation calls and executive discussions with professionalism, transparency, and solution-focused communication.

•     Coordinate cross-functional resources to drive timely issue resolution and remove roadblocks.

•     Escalate critical customer risks internally when additional leadership visibility or organizational support is required.

•     Serve as the primary escalation advisor for Customer Support, Product Health, Engineering, Customer Success, and Professional Services teams.

Proactive Customer Risk Management

•     Monitor customer health indicators, open support activity, escalation trends, and customer sentiment for assigned accounts.

•     Identify potential customer risks before they become escalations.

•     Partner with Customer Success, Customer Support, and Product Health to develop proactive risk mitigation plans.

•     Align internal stakeholders around at-risk customers and high-priority business situations.

•     Track recurring challenges and ensure follow-through on customer commitments.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Coordination

•     Coordinate complex, multi-team customer issues requiring collaboration across Support, Product Health, Engineering, Product Management, QA, and Customer Success.

•     Facilitate alignment between technical teams and customer-facing teams to ensure accurate communication and coordinated execution.

•     Drive accountability across stakeholder groups so customer commitments are met.

•     Participate in critical customer reviews, executive briefings, and escalation governance discussions.

Voice of the Customer & Product Advocacy

•     Synthesize recurring customer pain points, systemic issues, and product gaps observed across the strategic account portfolio.

•     Communicate findings, customer risks, and actionable recommendations to Product Health, Product Management, and Engineering leadership.

•     Lead recurring customer defect roadmap meetings with Customers, Product Health, Product Management, Engineering, and Customer Success to review customer-impacting defects, align priorities, communicate status, and advocate for customer-driven outcomes.

•     Serve as the primary customer advocate during roadmap and prioritization discussions for strategic accounts.

•     Document escalation outcomes, root causes, lessons learned, and improvement opportunities.

•     Provide executive-ready summaries of customer feedback, product risks, and enhancement opportunities.

Customer Health Governance

•     Support Customer Health reporting and escalation governance processes.

•     Participate in regular customer risk reviews and strategic account discussions.

•     Ensure escalation documentation is complete, accurate, and available for executive review.

•     Contribute to continuous improvement initiatives designed to strengthen customer outcomes and reduce recurring customer-impacting issues.

Standards & Compliance

•     Maintain full compliance with HIPAA Privacy Rule requirements; this role regularly accesses Protected Health Information (PHI) as part of daily responsibilities.

•     Uphold the highest standards of professionalism in all written and verbal communications.

•     Demonstrate exceptional judgment, composure, and accountability during high-pressure customer situations.

•     Model a commitment to customer excellence, partnership, transparency, and responsiveness.

•     Serve as a trusted representative of the Customer Health organization.

Required Qualifications

•     7+ years of customer support, customer success, technical account management, account management, or escalation management experience within a SaaS environment.

•     Minimum 3 years serving strategic accounts, enterprise customers, or executive-visible customer relationships.

•     Demonstrated experience independently managing high-risk customer escalations from intake through resolution.

•     Proven ability to communicate effectively with executive-level customer stakeholders, including VP and C-suite audiences.

•     Experience coordinating complex customer issues across Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Professional Services, or Support organizations.

•     Strong understanding of customer relationship management, customer-risk mitigation, and escalation governance practices.

•     Experience synthesizing customer feedback and translating findings into business recommendations.

•     Exceptional verbal communication, executive communication, presentation, and customer management skills.

•     Demonstrated ability to remain composed and effective in high-pressure situations.

•     Experience working within Salesforce, Jira, or similar customer management and ticketing platforms.

•     Ability to maintain full compliance with HIPAA Privacy Rule requirements.