Associate Director, Customer Experience

Job Description

Job Description:\n\nTrue Classic is hiring a Associate Director, Customer Experience to own the entire customer experience across every channel we sell on — Shopify (DTC), TikTok Shop, Amazon, wholesale, and retail. This role is accountable for how every customer feels after they meet us: the resolution of every question, the speed of every reply, the consistency of every interaction, and the loyalty we earn on the other side of it. You'll set the vision for what world-class customer happiness looks like at True Classic — and then go build and run it. The mandate is anchored in the post-purchase experience, but it doesn't stop there. We want this leader to look up the funnel — pre-purchase questions, sizing and fit help, the moments that turn a browser into a buyer — and make the experience feel like one brand no matter where a customer finds us. Same voice, same standards, same care, whether someone buys on TikTok Shop at midnight or walks into a retail store on a Saturday. This is an AI-native role by design. We're building the customer happiness function of the future — a blend of in-house-built automation and best-in-class external tooling that lets us resolve faster, personalize deeper, and care at a scale that wasn't possible a few years ago. You should be the kind of operator who reaches for technology to solve a customer pain point before you reach for headcount — and who knows exactly when to let a human take over. How we run it isn't negotiable. Customer Happiness operates on three dimensions in strict priority order — Quality first, Speed second, Cost third — and every metric ladders into one of the three. We never trade down the order. The service bar is Ritz-Carlton, Nordstrom-level: anticipate problems and resolve them before they become a thing, and when a customer does reach out, make it right no matter what, at the fastest possible speed. Support here is not a cost center — it's an acquisition engine through public reputation and pre-purchase help, an LTV engine through fast, fair resolutions and loyalty, and an efficiency engine through AI and automation. You'll own all three. You'll also own True Classic Insiders, our loyalty program — the engine that turns happy customers into repeat customers and advocates. You'll thrive here if you genuinely love customers and treat their problems like your own, if you think in systems and SLAs as naturally as you think in empathy, and if the phrase "we could automate that" makes you lean in rather than flinch. This is a builder's role: real ownership, a real team, and the autonomy to run customer happiness like it's your own business. All of True Classic's roles are global and omni-channel, leading designated areas of accountability across all product categories, countries, and sales and marketing channels. While this role lives in customer experience, you'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with Marketing, Merchandising, Operations, Retail, and Marketplace leaders to keep the brand consistent and the experience compounding — everywhere we touch a customer. All of True Classic's roles are global and omni-channel, leading designated areas of accountability across all product categories, countries, and sales and marketing channels. This role will have impact across DTC, retail, wholesale, marketplaces, and emerging channels, ensuring strategic alignment and executional rigor across the enterprise.Areas of AccountabilityVision, Strategy & StandardsSet the vision for what customer happiness means at True Classic, and translate it into a clear, measurable operating plan the team can execute against.Run the function on three dimensions in strict priority order — Quality first, Speed second, Cost third — so every metric and trade-off ladders into one of the three, and we never trade down the order.Define the experience standards — tone, response times, resolution quality, and policy — that apply consistently across DTC, TikTok Shop, Amazon, wholesale, and retail, held to a Ritz-Carlton / Nordstrom-level bar.Own the customer happiness roadmap: where we invest, what we automate, what we build, and what we fix next, prioritized by customer and business impact.Be the internal voice of the customer — bring the truth of what customers are experiencing into the rooms where decisions get made. Key metrics: Company-wide CSAT and QA / experience-standard adherence score — the truest read on whether the vision is actually showing up in how customers feel and how the team performs.AI, Automation & ToolingBuild and run an AI-native customer happiness function — combining best-in-class external platforms (Kodif, Gorgias) with in-house-built automation and agents.Drive autonomous resolution: stand up AI agents that don't just answer questions but take action — process refunds, generate return labels, track and update orders — while protecting the quality and warmth of every interaction.Deploy AI and automation across the whole journey — triage and routing, agent assist, RAG-powered knowledge, and returns/refund automation — and move each from pilot to production with clear governance and guardrails.Treat AI as operational infrastructure, not a novelty: deploy it deliberately, govern it carefully, and scale it intentionally. Know when to automate and when to escalate, when to trust the model and when to trust the human.Own the customer happiness tech stack end-to-end — helpdesk (Gorgias), AI automation (Kodif), Shopify, Klaviyo, and the integrations that connect them — and continuously raise the bar on what it can do.Build the measurement layer that proves it's working: deflection and autonomous resolution rates, cost-per-ticket, throughput per hour, and the quality scores that keep automation honest. Key metrics: Autonomous / AI resolution rate, cost-per-ticket, and throughput per hour — together they prove technology is creating real leverage (resolving more, faster, cheaper) without sacrificing quality.Support Operations & Order ManagementRun world-class day-to-day support across every channel customers reach us on — email, SMS, iMessage, live chat, social DMs (Meta — Facebook and Instagram), TikTok Shop, Amazon messaging, and voice — all flowing into Gorgias as one queue, one set of standards, one team, to clear SLAs for response and resolution.Own the post-purchase moments that matter most: order tracking, lost-shipment investigation, returns, exchanges, refunds, and replacements — handled fast, fairly, and on-policy.Set escalation tiers and protocols so the right issues reach the right people quickly, and own high-priority escalations personally when they count.Make support proactive, not reactive — surface and resolve issues (shipping delays, at-risk orders) before the customer has to ask.Own the knowledge base and FAQ (e.g. Notion) so customers and agents — human and AI — always work from one accurate, current source of truth.Hold every interaction to True Classic's brand, quality, and compliance standards, including data privacy across geographies. Key metrics: First-contact resolution and average resolution time, return / refund cycle time, and refund save rate — resolution speed and quality is the core promise of post-sales support; return and refund cycle time is where customers most feel whether we're fast and fair, and refund save rate is where fair, fast handling protects revenue.Channel & Experience ConsistencyOwn the customer experience across all sales channels — Shopify (DTC), TikTok Shop, Amazon, wholesale, and retail — across all product categories and all geographies.Harmonize policy, voice, and service levels across channels that run on very different rails, so customers get one consistent True Classic experience wherever they buy.Extend the mandate up the funnel: improve pre-purchase and consideration-stage experiences (fit, sizing, product questions) that drive conversion — pre-purchase conversion assist — and reduce avoidable contacts downstream.Partner with channel owners to make sure on-platform experiences — Amazon messaging, TikTok Shop support, retail service standards — reflect True Classic's care and quality. Key metrics: CSAT spread across channels (best vs. worst) and contact rate by channel — consistency shows customers get one True Classic wherever they buy; contact rate flags where a channel's experience is generating avoidable friction.Team & BPO LeadershipLead, coach, and grow a blended team of onshore and offshore team members, plus BPO partners across multiple markets.Build the systems that make a distributed team great: knowledge bases, QA frameworks, performance standards, staffing and coverage models, and clear escalation paths.Manage BPO relationships end-to-end — onboarding, training, quality, and performance — and hold partners to True Classic's standards as if they were in the building.Plan for peak: build the capacity, staffing, and automation to deliver through BFCM, Prime Day, product launches, and every high-volume moment without dropping the experience. Key metrics: QA-score parity across onshore / offshore / BPO teams and SLA attainment (response and resolution times) — quality parity proves the standard holds everywhere; SLA attainment proves the team is staffed and run to deliver it, including at peak.Ratings, Reviews & ReputationOwn the customer's public voice. Manage ratings and reviews across every place True Classic shows up — on-site product reviews (Okendo), Amazon, Google, Trustpilot, the App Store, social, and the long tail of review sites and forums.Build the systems to monitor, respond to, and escalate reviews at scale — protecting the brand's reputation while turning unhappy customers into resolved, retained ones.Drive review volume and quality: design the post-purchase flows and incentives that earn more honest, positive reviews, and lift average rating across channels over time.Feed review and ratings signal into the insight-and-action loop, so what customers say publicly drives the same product, fit, and experience fixes as what they tell us privately.Set the standards and playbooks for review response — tone, speed, and escalation — and hold onshore, offshore, and BPO teams to them. Key metrics: Blended average star rating across channels (Okendo, Amazon, Google, Trustpilot) and review response rate / time — public rating is a direct conversion and trust driver up the funnel, and our front-door acquisition lever; response coverage protects the brand and recovers unhappy customers.True Classic Insiders (Loyalty)Own True Classic Insiders, our loyalty program — its strategy, performance, and roadmap.Use loyalty as a retention and advocacy engine: design the rewards, tiers, and experiences that turn satisfied customers into repeat buyers and word-of-mouth advocates.Connect loyalty to the rest of the customer happiness function and to Marketing, so program members feel recognized at every touchpoint. Key metrics: Member repeat-purchase rate / member LTV and active-member growth — repeat rate and LTV show loyalty is actually driving retention and economics; member growth shows the program is expanding its share of the customer base.Insight & Action SystemsOwn the customer happiness scorecard: CSAT, NPS, CES, first-contact resolution, response and resolution times, contact rate, cost-per-ticket, throughput per hour, refund save rate, and revenue generated in support conversations — and their connection to retention and LTV.Build the systems that capture customer signal at scale — support conversations, feedback, reviews, returns reasons, and behavior — and turn it into structured, trustworthy data.Run the analysis, draw the insight, and make clear recommendations: what's driving contacts, where the experience is breaking, and the highest-impact pain points and opportunities to go after.Close the loop on two levels: resolve the individual issue fast (inner loop), and build the cross-functional systems that route systemic insight to Product, Merchandising, Operations, and Marketing — and drive it through to a fix (outer loop) — so the same problem doesn't come back. The customer is heard twice: once when we resolve their ticket, and again when their signal removes the cause.Own the full path from data to done. You're accountable not just for surfacing insight, but for getting it acted upon — measured by time-from-signal-to-action and by the pain points permanently removed from the customer journey.Report performance in real time and bring a clear point of view on where the experience is winning, where it's slipping, and what we're doing about it. Key metrics: Time-from-signal-to-action and recurring contact-drivers eliminated (with downstream contact-rate reduction) — these prove insight is turning into fixes that permanently remove friction and cost, not just reports. The cheapest ticket is the one we prevent.Cross Functional CollaborationPartner with Marketing to align customer happiness with brand voice, lifecycle, and the broader customer journey.Work with Merchandising and Product to feed customer insight into fit, quality, and assortment decisions.Coordinate with Operations and Supply Chain on fulfillment, shipping, and returns experiences that drive contact volume.Align with Marketplace and Retail leaders to keep the experience consistent across Amazon, TikTok Shop, wholesale, and stores.Collaborate with Data/Analytics and Engineering to build the reporting and in-house tooling that scales the function.Work with Finance on staffing, BPO spend, and the cost-to-serve model.Qualifications8+ years in customer experience, customer service, or customer success — including direct ownership of a customer-facing function at a high-growth DTC or e-commerce brand.Proven experience leading both onshore and offshore teams, and managing BPO partners to a high standard.Hands-on fluency with DTC customer service tooling — Gorgias and Kodif (or comparable platforms such as Kustomer, Richpanel, Gladly, or Zendesk) are particularly important — plus Shopify and Klaviyo.A genuinely AI-native, forward-thinking operator: you've deployed automation and AI agents to resolve customer issues at scale, and you have the judgment to know where they help and where they don't.Track record of building and improving systems — knowledge bases, QA frameworks, SLAs, staffing models — not just running day-to-day operations.Strong command of CX metrics (CSAT, NPS, CES, FCR, contact rate, cost-per-ticket) and how they connect to retention and LTV.A builder and a leader: you can set the vision and roll up your sleeves to deliver it. Comfortable being hands-on in a fast-moving, lean environment.Deep, real customer empathy — you go the extra mile for customers and expect your team to do the same.Strong communication skills and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving, matrixed, omni-channel organization.Preferred QualificationsExperience owning customer experience across multiple sales and social channels (DTC, Amazon, TikTok Shop, Meta — Facebook a