Global Service Desk & Incident Manager

Payment24; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

Payment24 in Cape Town, South Africa, seeks a Global Service Desk & Incident Manager to own our worldwide support function. You will oversee the incident lifecycle, escalation, and crisis response, reporting to senior leadership and partnering with engineering, QA and account management.

The role demands proven desk management, rostering, capacity planning, and strong stakeholder communication, with enterprise customers and regional teams across multiple time zones.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a management role running a service desk or technical support in live service environments.
• Proven ability to organise helpdesk resources, forecasting volumes and rostering.
• Crisis management experience during high-volume incidents with enterprise customers.
• Solid incident management discipline and ITIL knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Own the incident management lifecycle end to end across regions.
• Act as incident commander on major incidents and coordinate engineering and customers.
• Manage volume surges by reprioritising queues and deploying resources.
• Define severity levels, escalation matrices and on-call rotations.
• Run post-incident reviews and drive problem management.
• Track SLA performance and report misses.
• Forecast call and ticket volumes and plan capacity.
• Own rostering and shift planning for multi-region coverage.
• Design and maintain desk processes, triage and escalation rules.
• Build and maintain knowledge bases and runbooks.
• Set and monitor operational metrics and act on them.
• Lead, coach and develop the support team.

Skills

Management experience

Crisis management

Incident management

ITIL Foundations

Multi-region / 24x7 support

Stakeholder communication

Team leadership & coaching

Service desk operations

Job description

Job title: Global Service Desk & Incident Manager

Company: Payment24

Location: Cape Town, South Africa — on-site

Employment type: Full-time, permanent

Seniority: Mid-Senior level

Function: Customer Service / Information Technology

Industry: Financial Services / Software Development

About Payment24

Payment24 is a B2B SaaS payments company headquartered in South Africa. We build white‑label platforms for fleet management, payment processing, card issuing, loyalty, cloud switching and tokenisation — used by oil companies, fuel retailers, banks and enterprises across Africa, the GCC, LATAM and other emerging markets.

Our platforms sit in the live transaction path. When they slow down, our customers’ forecourts and card programmes feel it immediately. Service management isn’t a back‑office function here — it’s central to how we hold trust.

The role

You will own our global support function: every inbound call and helpdesk ticket from every region we operate in, the processes that govern how they are handled, and the team that handles them.

This is a management role and we are explicit about that. We are not looking for a strong senior agent ready for a step up — we are looking for someone who has already run a desk: who has built rosters, forecast volumes, designed escalation paths, managed under performance, and stood in front of an angry enterprise customer during a live outage.

Two things define the job. First, structure: organising helpdesk resources and processes so the desk runs predictably on an ordinary Tuesday. Second, crisis: taking command when it isn’t ordinary — when volumes surge, a region is degraded, and everyone is looking for the person who will bring order to it.

You will report into senior leadership and work closely with engineering, QA and account management.

What you’ll do

Incident management and crisis response

• Own the incident management lifecycle end to end: detection, logging, categorisation, prioritisation, escalation, resolution and closure
• Act as incident commander on major incidents — coordinating engineering, running the communication cadence to customers and leadership, and keeping a clean record of what happened and when
• Take control during volume surges: reprioritise the queue, pull in and re‑deploy resources, activate overflow and callback procedures, and keep customers informed while the backlog is worked down
• Define severity levels, escalation matrices, on‑call rotations and major incident procedures — and rehearse them before they are needed
• Run post‑incident reviews and drive problem management so the same issue does not come back
• Track SLA performance and report it honestly, including the misses

Organising helpdesk resources and processes

• Manage all incoming calls and helpdesk tickets across all regions, including out‑of‑hours and follow‑the‑sun coverage
• Forecast call and ticket volumes and plan capacity against them — headcount, shift patterns and skills coverage per timezone
• Own rostering and shift planning so multi‑region coverage is genuinely staffed, including peak periods, month‑end, public holidays and leave
• Design and maintain the operating processes of the desk: triage and prioritisation rules, ticket routing, handover between shifts and regions, escalation to engineering, and customer communication standards
• Build and maintain the knowledge base, runbooks and standard responses that let the team resolve more at first contact
• Set and monitor operational metrics — first‑response time, first‑contact resolution, backlog age, call abandonment, average handling time, CSAT — and act on what they show

Team leadership

• Lead, coach and develop the support team: hiring, onboarding, one‑on‑ones, performance management and career development
• Run quality assurance on calls and tickets against defined standards, with structured feedback
• Build a culture where the team escalates early, documents properly and takes ownership
• Manage workload distribution so the desk is not carried by two people

Continuous improvement

• Identify recurring issues and work with engineering and product to remove the root causes driving volume
• Improve tooling, workflows and automation across the ticketing and telephony stack
• Contribute to change management and release readiness from a service‑impact perspective

What we’re looking for

Essential

• 5+ years in a management role running a service desk, helpdesk or technical support function in a live service environment — with direct accountability for a team, its roster and its performance numbers. This is non‑negotiable.
• Demonstrable experience organising helpdesk resources and processes: capacity and volume forecasting, shift and roster design, queue and workload management, triage and escalation frameworks, SOPs and knowledge management
• Proven crisis management ability — you have led a desk through high‑volume surges and major incidents, and can describe specifically what you did, in what order, and what the outcome was
• Solid incident management discipline — ITIL Foundation certification, or equivalent hands‑on grounding in incident, problem and change management
• Experience running multi‑region and/or 24/7 support operations, including shift and handover models
• Confident stakeholder communication — you can brief an anxious enterprise customer and a technical engineer in the same hour and be clear to both
• Strong command of helpdesk, ticketing and telephony platforms, with the reporting to match
• Composure and judgement under sustained pressure, without becoming the bottleneck yourself

Advantageous

• Background in payments, fintech, card processing or another transaction‑critical environment
• Experience supporting enterprise or oil and gas customers
• ITIL Intermediate / Managing Professional certification
• Workforce management tooling experience
• Exposure to Azure, SQL‑based systems or API‑driven platforms — enough to speak credibly with engineers
• Additional languages relevant to our regions

Why join us

• Real ownership — you are shaping the service function, not inheriting a rigid one
• Genuine global exposure: customers and colleagues across Africa, the GCC and LATAM
• Direct access to leadership and to the engineering teams behind the platform
• A company that has been building and running mission‑critical payments infrastructure for over a decade