Garlock Flexibles is hiring: Customer Service Manager in Gardner

Overview

Garlock Flexibles began it journey in 1987 printing high-quality graphics on paper tissues and helped numerous consumer brands protect and elevate their products and image with creativity, elegance, and style. In 2001, Garlock expanded into flexible films and continued to grow, applying the same principles.

Today, Garlock is a multi-site business specializing in flexible pouch, lidding, and rollstock. It is a leader in fresh food packaging. The Garlock™ brand stands for exceptional packaging that keeps your brands and products fresh. Garlock’s focus on freshness helps the largest produce brands make a great impression by delivering the crispest leafy greens from field to table. Garlock’s focus on freshness traps the aroma of freshly roasted coffee beans, and its focus on freshness keeps the crunch in healthy snacks.

Job Summary

The Customer Service Manager is responsible for establishing and maintaining a service- oriented relationship with external and internal customers. The successful leader will ensure the customer service owns and manages customer orders, from receipt to fulfillment, with a high level of personal ownership.

The successful leader will ensure the customer service team establishes and maintains a professional rapport internally and externally with the customer. The leader will lead by example, advocating for the customer internally, and work effectively across all functions within Garlock. The customer service function touches every area of the business and must be effective in working across the organization as well as up and down in the organization. To this end, the leader will develop a strong team with strong, timely and effective communication skills, ensuring internal, cross-functional alignment with internal stakeholders as well as to the customer.

The leader will be responsible for developing and deploying strategies to increase customer satisfaction, enhance the use of technology, and drive efficiency through business process improvement. The successful candidate will lead the implementation of these process improvements and implement alternative methods to increase efficiency and improve customer satisfaction.

Reporting directly to the Director of Operations - Gardner, this is a highly autonomous leadership role on the Gardner’s site director’s staff. The leader understands the customer service team is Garlock’s first and lasting customer impression. The position will have end-to-end customer responsibility from customer inquiry to customer onboarding to order entry and order management to order fulfillment to post-sale support.

Essential Job Functions

• Customer Relationship Management: Leads by examples. Builds and maintains strong relationships with customers and ensures their team does so as well.
  1. Builds customer loyalty by understanding each key customer’s unique needs and then works with the team, and cross-functionally, to ensure a personalized service model is developed; one that will ensure all customer expectations are met or exceeded. Creates competitive advantage through an exceptional customer experience.
• Sales and Sales Support: Ensure the customer service team is partnered and paired with the commercial team. Ensures there is a team-approach to account management. In some situations, and by mutual agreement with Garlock’s Director of Sales, some accounts may be assigned to the customer service teammates and managed as “house accounts”.
• New Item Creation: Ensure the customer team is proficient in new item creation and related workflows and routings.
• Pricing: Responsible for the administration of price changes in the system. Ensures the customer service team manages price-changes promptly and with a high degree of accuracy (quarterly price changes, matrix pricing, and ad-hoc price change management).
• Order Coordination and Tracking: Collaborates with scheduling, production and supply chain to oversee overall order status and customer priorities.
  1. Works with the organization to establish and manage/keep up to date the communication of standard lead-times.
  2. Ensures the customer service team proactively keeps customers apprised of order status and progress.
  3. Ensure there is timely delivery of products and helps verify and ensure the team meets customer specifications in terms of quality and order accuracy.
  4. Ensures customer inventory agreements are managed within terms (min/max. levels, disposition of obsolete and slow-moving materials).
• Quality Assurance and Issue Resolution: Works directly with the Quality function to proactively identify and resolve any potential issues that could arise during the production process.
  1. Ensure the customer service team does a thorough job with the initial intake of customer complaints and then proactively drives the organization through the investigation, contributing to efforts to develop and deliver solutions, and implementing corrective actions.
  2. Ensure the team is timely in the communication of complaint status through to completion/resolution/closure.
• Team Leadership, Training and Development: The customer service manager must thoroughly understand our business, before they can be fully effective as the team leader. After investing an appropriate amount time understanding our business, the customer service manager must effectively motivate/inspire, lead, mentor, and develop the customer service team.
  1. The leader will maintain direct customer service responsibility for a few accounts on an ongoing basis to ensure they develop and maintain a working knowledge of our systems, customer-facing processes, and workflows.
  2. The leader will set and measure, assess and continuously improve high standards of performance.
  3. The leader will conduct regular training sessions to improve knowledge of products (printed flexible food packaging), production processes, ERP system (Radius) and customer-facing business processes.
  4. The leader is responsible for the empirical evaluation of departmental productivity and use empirical evidence for any justification of additional departmental resources.
• Reporting and Analysis: Support the business strategy through the creation of all customer-facing business processes, standards and metrics. Publishes KPI’s and uses to drive team and organizational performance. Uses these key insights to recommend strategies for increasing efficiency and improving customer experiences.
• Process Improvement: Responsible for the analysis of customer feedback and service performance data to identify trends, bottlenecks, and areas for improvement.
  1. Develops and implements process improvements that will enhance service quality and improve customer satisfaction.
  2. Works to continuously improve all customer-facing business processes, standards and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Direct Reports

• The customer service manager will responsible for the recruiting, hire, training, management and development of customer service representatives, who will operate in an office environment.

Location, Travel, and Relocation Benefits

• Occasional travel is required (~10%) for customer site visits and trade shows.
• The role is a full-time, on-site position located in Gardner, MA. The individual must be present in the office during the company’s normal office hours Monday through Friday.
  1. Occasional remote work may be considered on an ad-hoc basis, provided individual and team performance is consistently impeccable.
• Competitive relocation benefits are available.

Education and Experience:

• Minimum of 3-5 years in a customer service management role within a manufacturing environment and, ideally within the flexible printing or consumer packaging industry.
• Bachelor’s degree desirable but not required.

Skills:

• Must have strong leadership skills.
• Must be able to become an effective motivator and influencer of others, without the need for formal position authority.
• Must have strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Must exhibit managerial courage.
• Understands how to manage conflict in healthy ways.
• Proficient computer skills including Microsoft Office. Must be proficient in Excel and familiar with ERP systems.

Other Attributes: Detail-oriented, adaptable, and proactive, with the ability to handle multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment.

Physical Requirements:

• Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
• While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to stand, walk, sit, and use hands to handle or feel.
• The employee is required to speak, listen, and hear well.
• The employee is occasionally required to reach with hands and arms.
• Ability to work nights and weekends as business dictates.

The operating environment is manufacturing and production facilities and the employee must be comfortable in both an office setting and a manufacturing shop floor. Shop exposure includes, but is not limited to, continuous noise, scent of materials, bright workstations, and heavy machinery with moving parts.

Other Details:

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time.

This company is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics.