Position Summary
LION is an international company that operates in three markets: the first responder/emergency services, military and civilian agency uniforms, and personal equipment markets. LION serves a global customer base of fire departments, law enforcement, military installations, institutions, corporate organizations, and training companies from multiple offices around the world creating world class uniforms and PPE.
Reporting to the Business Unit SVP, the Director of Customer Service & Sales Support provides strategic and operational leadership for the customer service and sales support organization, ensuring a consistently high-quality experience for customers, internal sales teams, and distribution partners.
This role is responsible for leading the organization through a significant period of transformation, including the implementation and adoption of new business systems, processes, and ways of working. The Director will balance day-to-day operational excellence with longer-term transformation, ensuring service continuity while developing more efficient, scalable, and customer-focused processes.
As a key partner to Sales, Operations, Supply Chain, Finance, IT, and distribution partners, the Director will improve the end-to-end customer experience, strengthen commercial support capabilities, establish clear service standards and performance measures, and create an environment of accountability and continuous improvement.
Key Responsibilities
Customer Service & Operational Leadership
- Provide strategic leadership and direction for the Customer Service and Sales Support organization, establishing clear priorities, service standards, roles, and performance expectations.
- Ensure timely, accurate, and professional support throughout the customer lifecycle, including inquiries, quotations, order processing, order status, issue resolution, returns, and other post-sale activities.
- Develop and monitor key performance indicators, service-level expectations, and operating metrics to improve responsiveness, quality, productivity, and customer satisfaction.
- Identify service gaps and recurring customer issues and work cross-functionally to drive sustainable corrective actions.
- Build scalable processes capable of supporting business growth, increasing transaction volumes, evolving customer expectations, and changing go-to-market strategies.
- Establish effective escalation processes for critical customer, order, delivery, pricing, or service issues.
Sales & Distribution Partner Support
- Serve as a key operational partner to internal sales teams, ensuring they have responsive and effective support throughout the sales and order fulfillment process.
- Develop a clear service model for supporting both direct customers and distribution partners, recognizing the different requirements of each channel.
- Strengthen communication and coordination among Customer Service, Sales, distributors, Operations, Supply Chain, and other business functions.
- Improve processes related to quotations, pricing administration, order management, customer information, and commercial documentation.
- Partner with Sales leadership to identify opportunities to remove administrative burden from sellers and enable greater focus on customer engagement and revenue growth.
- Develop consistent processes, tools, and expectations for supporting distributors and other channel partners.
- Act as an escalation point for complex or high-priority customer and distributor matters.
Systems Transformation & Change Leadership
- Play a leadership role in the implementation and adoption of new ERP, CRM, order management, customer service, and related business systems.
- Translate business requirements and customer needs into practical system and process solutions in partnership with IT and functional stakeholders.
- Assess existing workflows and use the systems transformation as an opportunity to simplify, standardize, and automate processes rather than replicating legacy practices.
- Lead the team's preparation for system changes, including process documentation, data readiness, user acceptance testing, training, communications, and adoption.
- Develop plans to maintain customer service and business continuity through system implementation and stabilization.
- Monitor post-implementation performance, identify issues quickly, and coordinate resolution across functional and technical teams.
- Champion adoption of new tools and processes while helping employees successfully navigate significant organizational change.
Continuous & Commercial Excellence
- Evaluate the end-to-end order-to-cash and customer support experience to identify opportunities to reduce complexity, cycle time, errors, and manual work.
- Establish standardized operating procedures, workflows, documentation, and service-level agreements.
- Leverage technology, automation, data, and analytics to improve efficiency and decision-making.
- Develop meaningful reporting and dashboards to provide visibility into service performance, order activity, backlog, customer issues, and operational risks.
- Create a culture of continuous improvement in which employees are empowered to identify problems and recommend solutions.
- Partner cross-functionally to address root causes rather than relying on Customer Service to compensate for upstream or downstream process deficiencies.
People Leadership & Organizational Development
- Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing Customer Service and Sales Support team.
- Establish clear roles, responsibilities, performance expectations, and accountability across the organization.
- Assess organizational capabilities and recommend changes to structure, staffing, processes, and skills necessary to support future business requirements.
- Develop team capabilities in customer communication, problem solving, systems proficiency, commercial awareness, and cross-functional collaboration.
- Build succession plans and develop future leaders within the function.
- Foster a customer-focused, collaborative culture that values responsiveness, ownership, continuous improvement, and results.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Operations, Supply Chain, or a related discipline, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
- 8+ years of progressive experience in customer service, sales operations, commercial operations, order management, or related functions.
- 3+ years of significant people leadership experience, preferably leading multi-functional or geographically dispersed teams.
- Demonstrated experience improving customer-facing processes and operational performance.
- Experience supporting both direct sales organizations and distributor, dealer, or channel partner networks.
- Demonstrated ability to lead teams through organizational, process, or technology change.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making capabilities.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.