Sr. Manager of Customer Experience & Fulfillment

Applied Labs; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 185,000; Full time

Job summary

Applied Labs is hiring a Sr Manager of Customer Experience & Fulfillment to own the post-purchase customer journey across support, fulfillment, returns, and automation.

You will lead a 13+ person team across managers and frontline reps, and work with warehouse and 3PL partners to ensure issues are tackled at the source. The role emphasizes building an AI-first, scalable support organization while protecting essential human interactions.

Qualifications

• Must have led CX or support teams in high-growth DTC/ecommerce environments
• Experience managing high-volume, cross-functional CX
• Strong data-driven approach to CSAT, SLA, and QA
• Hands-on with AI, automation, or self-service workflows

Responsibilities

• Lead customer experience across email, chat, and phone for ~20,000 interactions per month
• Manage a remote international team of managers, leads, and frontline reps
• Own performance metrics including CSAT, first response time, SLA, and QA
• Build operating rhythms for reporting, coaching, escalations and performance
• Implement AI-focused automation strategy across tools like Gorgias, Shopify, Yuma
• Oversee fulfillment and post-purchase operations with internal warehouse and 3PL
• Monitor fulfillment SLAs, delays, order issues, returns, refunds, and escalations
• Collaborate with supply chain and warehouse teams to address root causes of customer-impacting failures

Job description

Location: Fully Remote, US

Job Type: Full-Time

Reports To: VP of Operations

About the role

We're hiring a Sr Manager of Customer Experience & Fulfillment to own and scale the post-purchase customer experience across support, fulfillment, returns, and automation.

You'll lead a team of 13+ across managers, team leads, and frontline support reps while overseeing customer experience across email, chat, and phone. You'll also work closely with our internal warehouse, 3PL, supply chain, and operations teams to make sure fulfillment issues are caught quickly, escalated appropriately, and solved at the source.

This is a performance ownership role. You'll own the systems, standards, people, and metrics behind the customer experience, not just the support queue.

A major part of the role is building an AI-first support organization that can scale without adding headcount at the same rate as volume. We want to automate repetitive, transactional interactions aggressively while protecting the human moments that actually matter.

Automate the ordinary. Humanize the extraordinary.

Ideal Background

The strongest candidates for this role have led customer experience or support teams inside high-growth DTC/ecommerce businesses, ideally with meaningful order volume and operational complexity. You operated against clear service-level and customer satisfaction targets, and used data to diagnose what is actually driving performance.

You're comfortable getting into the details when needed, but your default is to build systems and leaders that keep the operation running without you becoming the bottleneck.

You likely come from an environment where customer support, fulfillment, refunds, shipping issues, and ecommerce operations are tightly connected.

Strong signals:

• Led a customer support or CX team of 5–10+ people, ideally through team leads or managers
• Managed high-volume DTC/ecommerce customer support
• Shopify experience
• Experience operating against CSAT, first response time, SLA, and QA targets
• Built dashboards and reporting independently
• Hands-on experience implementing AI, automation, or self-service workflows
• Experience improving support efficiency without relying primarily on additional headcount
• Comfortable working across support, fulfillment, warehouse, and operations teams
• Experience holding internal teams or external partners accountable to service standards

What you'll do

Customer Experience Operations

• Lead customer support across email, chat, and phone, supporting approximately 20,000 customer interactions per month.
• Manage and develop managers, team leads, and frontline reps across a remote international team.
• Own performance across first human response time, CSAT, SLA adherence, QA, and other core support metrics.
• Build clear operating rhythms across reporting, coaching, escalations, and performance management.
• Stay close enough to the operation to understand what customers are experiencing without becoming the person who has to personally solve every issue.
• Maintain high service standards across a seven-day support operation.

AI & Automation

• Own the CX automation strategy across Gorgias, Shopify, Yuma, and other tools we adopt.
• Identify repetitive contacts that can be automated, eliminated, or shifted to self-service.
• Build, test, and improve AI workflows based on actual customer outcomes, not just automation rate.
• Push toward automating the large majority of routine customer interactions without creating a worse customer experience.
• Establish clear guardrails for situations where human judgment is required, including legal issues, complex escalations, and emotionally sensitive customer interactions.
• Continuously evaluate new tools and workflows that allow the team to support more volume without proportional headcount growth.

Fulfillment & Post-Purchase

• Oversee the customer-facing performance of our internal warehouse and 3PL.
• Monitor fulfillment SLAs, shipping delays, order exceptions, mis-picks, damages, lost shipments, and other customer-impacting issues.
• Hold partners accountable to agreed service levels and ***escalate*** recurring operational problems.
• Work closely with supply chain and warehouse teams to solve root causes behind customer-facing failures.
• Oversee returns, refunds, reships, and service recovery processes.
• Support customer inquiries related to wholesale and drop-ship orders.
• Ensure major customer-impacting operational issues are