VP, Support Services
Darwin Homes
About Darwin Homes
At Darwin Homes, we fundamentally believe that the rental experience is broken. Too often, property management—serving as the middleman between investors and residents—often means shoddy service, hidden fees, and inefficient processes that shortchange everybody involved. Darwin was built to make residents' and owners' lives easier through an innovative ecosystem of technologies. We have created the best product in the market for residents to discover, tour and lease their future home; and for owners to have complete peace of mind from our modern management and leasing services built around our core values of transparency and professionalism. Darwin Homes is the destination for single-family rental services for property owners and residents.
The Team
The Darwin Homes team is composed of a diverse set of alumni from DoorDash, Square, Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn and other top technology companies. The founders and executive team have over 30+ years of combined experience in scaling disruptive technology and operations-focused businesses.
Darwin Homes was backed by top Silicon Valley venture capital (Khosla, Fifth Wall) and was acquired by Pagaya Technologies, a publicly traded company, in early 2023. Pagaya is an AI/ML data technology company with offices in Tel Aviv, New York and Austin.
On which team within Darwin will this role be hosted? This role is one within the company’s Support Services Department. Support Services oversees Darwin’s call center personnel and operations as well as technology solutions related to task monitoring, management, and execution.
Role & Responsibilities
As our VP of Support Services, you will be responsible for managing and leading a global team of support team members, ensuring delivery of SLAs, operational efficiencies, and process improvements, while providing exceptional customer service via Darwin’s proprietary software, support tools, and portals. The support team provides 24/7/365 coverage for Darwin’s residents and vendors who live in homes located across 30+ markets and all regions and time zones of the U.S.
This is an extremely dynamic and demanding role, requiring full ownership over the customer support framework, team/BPO management, and setting and continually improving the standards of support that we deliver in an omnichannel environment (phone, email, SMS, chat). This role will require extreme cross-functional collaboration, communication, and analytics skills to ensure the successful adoption of support processes and tools.
This critical leadership role will report to the COO.
What You'll Do
- Own Customer Outcomes: As the VP of Support Services for Darwin Homes, lead the development of a strong customer support model to enhance resident and vendor confidence and satisfaction.
- Develop and Implement a Unified Support Vision: Develop a support framework and process that aligns with Darwin's objectives and delivers an amazing customer support experience while being cost-effective.
- Operate with Extreme Rigor: Focus on operational excellence and availability, ensuring support standards meet customer expectations in our 24/7/365, rapidly growing environment.
- Make Data-Driven Decisions: Use customer support metrics to improve performance and make informed decisions.
- Design and Implement Feedback Mechanisms: Design methods to capture and evaluate customer feedback, ensuring their concerns are addressed.
- Improve and Optimize Tech Stack: Continually improve and optimize our support tech stack (based on Zendesk) and reporting system to improve operational understanding, performance and meet SLAs.
- Team Development: Provide feedback, training, and guidance to the support team, reinforcing their knowledge of our software. This will require significant collaboration with our partner BPOs in Mexico and the Phillippines.
- Advocate for the Customer: Manage NPS/CSAT and share customer feedback and escalations with relevant teams to identify and understand and address root causes.
Evaluation Criteria
- Performance of your department, as measured by the quality of calls and email responses
- Adherence of the contact center personnel to official procedures and policies
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score
- Responsiveness to Emails and SMSs: First Reply Time, First Resolution Time
- Responsiveness to inbound calls: Average wait time, # Missed Calls, Other documented KPIs & SLAs related to your department
- Distributing information and updates in a timely and effective manner to all contact/support center personnel
- Exhibition of below-listed “target traits”
- Leadership, training, support, and supervision provided to assigned personnel
What You Have
- Preferred: Prior experience in the real estate/property management industry
- Experience leading a call center/support services organization
- Track record of relevant, strong professional performance
- In-depth knowledge of call center operations, including workforce management, performance metrics, and customer service principles
- Analytical mindset and proficiency in using call center software and tools for data analysis and reporting
- Strong leadership and people management skills
- Exceptional organizational abilities
- Ability to effectively collaborate and work in a cross-functional manner
- Ability to effectively present information
- Self-motivated and capable of working in a demanding, fast-paced environment
- 4-year degree; no preferences with respect to the focus of study
- Commitment to embodying our organization’s target traits: Professionalism, Courtesy, Attention to Detail, Initiative, Communication & Coordination, Transparency, Reliability