MSP Service Desk Director
Posted Updated
Description
SUMMARY
The MSP Service Desk Director provides strategic and operational leadership for the service desk function across managed services clients. Based on site in the Philippines, this role leads an offshore service delivery organization that operates across multiple time zones to support clients and internal partners, including coverage aligned with U.S. business hours. The role is accountable for delivering consistent, scalable, secure, and client-centered support experience; achieving contractual service levels; developing high-performing leaders and teams; and continuously improving the people, processes, technology, and financial performance of the operation. The Director partners across MSP Engineering, NOC, Security, Cloud, Professional Services, and client leadership to ensure effective issue resolution, clear ownership, seamless handoffs, and continuous service delivery across regions
JOB RESPONSIBILITIES
- Establish and execute the vision, operating model, annual objectives, and roadmap for the MSP Service Desk in alignment with organizational strategy and client commitments.
- Lead day-to-day service desk operations across support tiers, shifts, and client environments, ensuring appropriate queue management, ticket triage, ownership, prioritization, escalation, and closure.
- Provide visible, onsite leadership for the Philippines-based service desk operation, reinforcing accountability, engagement, communication, and consistent execution across all shifts.
- Own service performance against contractual SLAs and internal targets, including response time, resolution time, first-contact resolution, backlog age, reopen rate, abandonment rate, average speed to answer, client satisfaction, and quality measures.
- Build a performance-management framework that translates service metrics into clear expectations, coaching, corrective actions, and continuous improvement plans for leaders and team members.
- Develop capacity, staffing, scheduling, and coverage models based on ticket demand, client growth, seasonality, skills, and after-hours requirements; maintain business continuity and on-call readiness.
- Design and manage shift coverage across time zones, including schedules aligned with U.S. business hours, after-hours support, weekends, holidays, and daylight-saving-time changes, based on client and business requirements.
- Lead, coach, and develop managers, supervisors, team leads, and technical staff; establish succession plans, career paths, training plans, and role-based competency standards.
- Create and maintain a consistent quality assurance program, including ticket audits, call reviews, documentation standards, client communication expectations, and trend-based coaching.
- Own major incident and high-severity escalation management for the service desk, including rapid coordination, executive and client communications, service restoration, post-incident review, and follow-through on corrective actions.
- Ensure incident, service request, problem, change, knowledge, and escalation processes are documented, measurable, and aligned with ITIL/ITSM leading practices.
- Drive effective use, governance, and optimization of PSA, RMM, ITSM, telephony, remote support, documentation, reporting, and workforce-management platforms.
- Champion standardization, shift-left practices, knowledge management, self-service, automation, and responsible use of AI to improve speed, consistency, scalability, and the client experience.
- Analyze ticket volume, categories, recurring issues, demand patterns, and client trends to identify root causes, reduce preventable contacts, and coordinate improvement plans with engineering and other resolver groups.
- Partner with MSP Engineering, NOC, Security, Cloud, Professional Services, vCIO, Sales, and Client Success teams to define handoffs, escalation paths, support boundaries, and accountability across the service lifecycle.
- Serve as the primary operational bridge between the Philippines service desk and U.S.-based leaders and teams, maintaining clear handoffs, escalation paths, documentation, and communication across regions.
- Oversee service desk readiness for new client onboarding, technology transitions, mergers, acquisitions, and significant changes, including staffing, documentation, access, tooling, training, and hypercare plans.
- Build and maintain strong relationships with client leadership; participate in service reviews as needed, address escalations, set expectations, and translate client feedback into measurable improvements.
- Own the department budget, labor model, vendor spend, forecasting, productivity, and financial performance; balance service quality, employee engagement, scalability, and cost-to-serve.
- Define vendor and partner performance expectations, review service delivery, resolve recurring issues, and ensure third-party support aligns with client and organizational requirements.
- Support proposals, renewals, and solution design by providing operational assumptions, staffing models, service-level considerations, risks, dependencies, and cost inputs.
- Provide executive reporting on service health, risks, capacity, client experience, financial performance, and improvement initiatives, with clear owners and action plans.
- Monitor MSP and service management market trends, evolving client expectations, automation capabilities, and leading practices; recommend investments and operating-model improvements.
- Promote a culture of accountability, urgency, collaboration, ownership, inclusion, and continuous learning while modeling the organization’s values.
- Build an inclusive, high-accountability offshore culture that is fully integrated with the broader MSP organization and consistently reflects the organization’s service standards and values.
- Perform other duties as assigned.
QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor’s degree in information technology, business, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant experience; master’s degree preferred.
- Eight or more years of progressive IT support or service delivery experience, including at least three years leading managers or multi-tier technical support teams; direct MSP experience strongly preferred.
- Demonstrated experience operating a multi-client service desk and managing competing contractual priorities, escalations, and service expectations.
- Demonstrated success leading an onsite offshore or globally distributed service delivery team, preferably in the Philippines, with strong cross-cultural leadership and communication skills.
- Strong knowledge of ITSM/ITIL practices, including incident, major incident, request, problem, change, knowledge, and service-level management; ITIL certification preferred.
- Experience managing service desk KPIs, SLAs, workforce capacity, quality assurance, client satisfaction, operational reporting, and continuous improvement programs.
- Working knowledge of common MSP platforms and practices, including PSA, RMM, ITSM/ticketing, remote support, documentation, monitoring, telephony, and reporting tools.
- Broad understanding of Microsoft 365, endpoint management, identity and access, networking, cloud services, cybersecurity, backup and recovery, and common end-user technologies sufficient to lead escalations and make sound operational decisions.
- Experience with automation, self-service, knowledge-centered support, and AI-enabled service management preferred.
- Experience supporting healthcare or other regulated clients and working within security, privacy, and compliance requirements preferred.
- Financial acumen with experience managing budgets, labor models, forecasting, vendor costs, and service-delivery economics.
- Proven ability to lead organizational change, develop leaders, improve employee engagement, and build accountable, high-performing teams in a remote or distributed environment.
- Ability and willingness to work onsite in the Philippines and maintain a schedule that provides meaningful overlap with U.S. time zones and other supported regions.
- Executive-level written, verbal, presentation, and client relationship skills, including the ability to communicate effectively during high-impact incidents and escalations.
- Strong analytical, decision-making, and problem-solving skills, with the ability to convert data and trends into practical actions and measurable outcomes.
- Ability to balance client experience, employee experience, risk, contractual commitments, scalability, and financial performance.
- Availability to provide leadership support outside standard business hours during major incidents, service disruptions, or other critical business needs.
- Flexibility to work across time zones and adjust working hours as business, client, staffing, or incident-response needs require.