Technical Account Manager

Job Description

Technical Account Manager

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Reports to Director of Customer Success  ·  Location Chicago  ·  Level Individual contributor

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Chicago (West Loop) · Hybrid (2 days/week onsite)

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Required: If you're interested in this role, please complete the Culture Index assessment here:

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About Continuum

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Continuum builds software that automates warranty and returns for distributors and manufacturers. Both are among the most painful transactions in distribution. A warranty claim can take a counter thirty minutes to start and thirty to forty-five days to resolve, moving by hand between a manufacturer portal, an ERP and a spreadsheet. Returns get keyed line by line, restocking and eligibility rules get applied by eyeball, and status is chased through a shared inbox. Credits get missed on both sides, and most distributors cannot total what they are owed.

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We replace that with one connected workflow. Continuum links a distributor's ERP — Epicor P21, Epicor Eclipse, Infor CloudSuite and others — to the manufacturer portals they file into, so the claim, the return authorization, the replacement order, the receipt, the vendor return and the credit all move together and stay in sync. Contractors and customers file and track their own claims and returns instead of calling a branch.

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Manufacturers sit on the other side of that same flow. Because Continuum already operates across a large part of the distribution layer, it gives them visibility into how warranty and returns actually behave downstream — where claims stall, which parts keep failing and coming back, and where the distributor and contractor experience breaks down — rather than only what arrives in their own portal.

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We work with distributors and manufacturers across HVAC, plumbing, electrical, industrial and heavy duty, from single-location businesses to multi-branch groups and national brands. We are a small team and growing quickly, and the people who join now get to shape how this works.

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Why this role exists

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Continuum automates warranty and returns for distributors and manufacturers. The product replaces a process that today runs on manufacturer portals, spreadsheets, sticky notes and one person who knows how everything works. When it lands properly, a contractor files their own claim or return in sixty seconds instead of calling a counter, and a distributor recovers vendor credits nobody could previously total.

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Getting it to land is the job. Not checking in on it. Getting it to land.

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We call this a Technical Account Manager rather than a Customer Success Manager because the work is genuinely technical. You will spend your time inside ERP transaction flows, manufacturer portals, and claim and return data. If a credit fails to post, we need you to know whether the problem is the return authorization, the receipt, the vendor return or the credit memo, and to be able to say so to both a warranty administrator and an engineer without either of them having to translate.

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What you'll own

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A book of roughly 25 to 30 accounts. Mostly multi-branch HVAC, plumbing, electrical and industrial distributors running Epicor P21, Epicor Eclipse or Infor CloudSuite, plus manufacturers on systems such as NetSuite and Oracle. Some run warranty, some run returns, some run both. They file claims against vendors including Carrier, Rheem, Daikin, Johnson Controls and ICP through portals such as ServiceBench, iWarranty and Warranty Express, and they process returns from authorization through receipt to credit in their ERP.

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You will own four numbers on those accounts.

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• Claim and return volume , measured against each account's own trend, at branch level.
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• End-user adoption — how many of your customer's customers file their own claims, against the number agreed at kickoff.
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• Transaction health — how many claims and returns fail, need corrections, or take fifteen comments to resolve.
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• Recovered value — vendor credits recovered and labor hours returned to the customer's team.
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What you'll actually do

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Drive customer adoption, not just user adoption. The value of this product only fully arrives when the distributor's own customers file their own claims and returns. That means branch rollout plans, contractor onboarding waves, training sessions, office hours, and working a list of two hundred contractors until they have logged in. This is the hardest part of the job and the part that decides whether an account renews.

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Debug. Claims and returns fail. Credits don't post. A vendor changes a portal, or a reason code stops mapping, and a flow breaks silently. You will read the audit log, work out what happened, and either fix the configuration yourself or write the engineering ticket that gets it fixed, with the customer impact and the ask spelled out.

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Transfer process ownership. Most of our customers arrived with warranty or returns living in one person's head. Our job is to move it into a system, across branches, with a named owner and a named backup. You make sure that actually happened rather than assuming it did.

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Prove the value. Monthly and quarterly, in numbers, generated from our reporting rather than assembled by hand. If a customer cannot tell their own boss what we are worth, that is your problem to solve before the renewal conversation, not during it.

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Surface risk early. We measure how fast you flag a problem, not how many problems you flag. A flag that turns out to be nothing is a good outcome. An account that churns without anyone seeing it coming is the only outcome we treat as a failure.

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What we're looking for

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The right person might come from a distributor's warranty desk or from a software company. What we can't teach is the instinct to get into the detail rather than escalate it.

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What we need

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• Genuine comfort at the product layer — you get into workflows, configurations and edge cases, and you don't stop at “I'll escalate that.”
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• Comfort with data. You should be able to open a claims or returns export, work out which branch is the problem, and say so with a number attached.
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• The ability to run a rollout. Named waves, training sessions, a list of contractors, and the persistence to work the list.
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• Experience designing and delivering end-user training, including building the materials rather than just presenting someone else's.
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• Writing that is clear enough for an executive and precise enough for an engineer.
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• Willingness to deliver bad news early, including to us.
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• Some travel for onsite rollouts and business reviews.
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Nice to have

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• Experience inside distribution or with a manufacturer — as a warranty administrator, returns or operations manager, branch manager, counter lead, or in AP chasing vendor credits.
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• Familiarity with a distribution ERP such as Epicor P21, Epicor Eclipse, Infor CloudSuite, Prelude, SXe, DMSi or Karmak.
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• Exposure to manufacturer warranty portals, or to return authorizations, reason codes and restocking policy.
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• An HVAC, plumbing, electrical or industrial background. Helpful, not required — we can teach the industry.
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How you'll be measured

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• Retention and growth across your book.
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• End-user adoption against the targets set at kickoff.
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• Time from first signal to raising a flag.
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• Every account carrying a current status and a next action.
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• Accounts leaving hypercare with the gate genuinely met, not waved through.
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Why this is worth doing

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Most customer success teams are busy without being useful. We are building one that knows this industry better than some of our customers' own staff, that can prove what it delivers in dollars and hours, and that catches problems while they are still fixable. You would be one of the first people in it, with real ownership and a say in how it works.