<p>Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.<br><br><strong>A day in the life (Responsibilities) </strong></p> <p>Toast is looking for a Senior Director, Customer Care Operational Excellence to own how our customer support organization operates, end to end. This is a build-and-run role: you will design (and continuously redesign) the people, process, systems, and data that determine whether every customer, from our smallest SMB accounts to our largest Enterprise relationships, gets a fast, effortless, high-quality resolution.</p> <p>This role sits at the center of our AI transformation of Support operations, evaluating, implementing, and scaling AI across chat, voice, and agent-assist workflows, while also owning the fundamentals: workforce planning and capacity, quality and performance measurement, and a closed-loop voice-of-customer program that feeds directly into our product and engineering roadmaps. You will lead a team, and this is a hands-on role: you're expected to get into the details, run point on hard problems personally, and build things yourself when needed.</p> <p><strong>Support Operating Model: People, Process & Systems</strong></p> <ul> <ul> <li>Own the end-to-end design of how Support operates: org structure, staffing model, tiering/routing, escalation paths, and channel model (chat, email, phone, self-service, community), and continuously refine it as the business scales.</li> <li>Build and run the operating cadence for the function: performance reviews, root-cause/escalation reviews, leadership readouts, and continuous-improvement rhythms.</li> <li>Segment design so that SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise customers each get a service model appropriate to their needs, complexity, and value.</li> </ul> <li><strong>AI & Support Technology Transformation</strong></li> <ul> <li>Own the roadmap for AI-enabled support, including virtual agents/chatbots, voice AI, agent-assist, and automation, from business case through implementation, measured adoption, and iteration.</li> <li>Partner with Product and Engineering as a co-owner of the tools and systems Support runs on: helpdesk/CRM, contact center (CCaaS), knowledge base, and AI/automation platforms, representing Support's requirements and stress-testing what's shipped.</li> <li>Evaluate, select, and manage the vendor and technology stack (including AI vendors and BPO/outsourcing partners), balancing cost, quality, and customer experience.</li> </ul> </ul> <p><strong>Data, Insights & Performance Measurement</strong></p> <ul> <ul> <li>Define the metrics that matter for Toast’s support operations, including but not limited to TTR/resolution time, CSAT, customer effort (CES), quality/QA scores, cost-to-serve, and AI containment/deflection rate. Partner with Analytics to build the reporting and analytics and associated insights to drive operations across lines of business, segments, channels, and geographies.</li> <li>Build a rigorous quality assurance program (QA scoring, calibration, coaching feedback loops) to ensure consistency as the org scales and as AI takes on more of the work.</li> <li>Use data to diagnose root causes of poor experience and prioritize the highest-leverage fixes across people, process, and systems.</li> </ul> <li><strong>Voice of the Customer & Product Feedback</strong></li> <ul> <li>Own Product Feedback program in partnership with VOC and other related efforts: capturing, synthesizing, and prioritizing feedback and issues surfaced through Support.</li> <li>Build the formal, closed-loop mechanism that routes customer and product feedback to R&D/Product leadership, ensuring it gets actioned and tracked through to impact on support volume and CSAT.</li> </ul> <li><strong>Workforce Planning & Capacity Management</strong></li> </ul> <ul> <li>Own workforce planning, forecasting, and capacity management (staffing, scheduling, shrinkage, real-time management) across in-house and outsourced/BPO teams.</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Model the impact of AI automation on headcount and capacity plans, and adjust staffing levels as containment rates change.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Cross-Functional Leadership & Partnership</strong></p> <ul> <ul> <li>Partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership as a genuine design partner on tools, features, and AI capabilities that affect the customer experience or support workload.</li> <li>Represent Support in cross-functional planning (Sales, Success, Finance, Legal/Compliance, Trust & Safety) and ensure Support's operational needs and constraints are reflected in company-wide decisions.</li> <li>Communicate performance, risk, and plans to executive leadership through regular business reviews.</li> </ul> </ul> <p><strong>Team Leadership & Talent Development</strong></p> <ul> <ul> <li>Build, lead, and develop a team of operations and operational excellence managers/leads; build the bench and succession plan for the function.</li> <li>Instill a hands-on, builder culture on the team: this function should be as comfortable running an analysis or drafting a process itself as it is directing others to do so.<br><br></li> </ul> </ul> <p><strong>What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)</strong><strong&g