Account Director, SaaS

at  EIS Group Inc

DESCRIPTION

The Account Director (AD) is accountable for the success of the customer’s solution and will act as the primary escalation point for all issues upon completion of the initial customer implementation program.
The AD is responsible for maintaining a 360 degree view of the overall health and success of the customer through appropriate operational reporting, issue tracking, customer check-ins, and staying abreast of EIS and 3rd party program status. The successful candidate understands the ecosystem of various customer and SI-partner stakeholders, their goals, specific interests, and concerns; they collaborate with the Client Partner to keep management abreast of the health of the customer and
escalates problems requiring higher-level intervention. The AD understands the various EIS stakeholders and EIS operating model to effectively work across the organization as required to address the needs and issues of the client. In situations where customer experiences major and/or chronic issues and/or is dissatisfied with the SaaS product and associated services, the AD is responsible for initiating investigation into the situation, engaging cross-organizational EIS resources and leadership as needed to understand root cause(s) and address the problem(s).
For SaaS customers, the AD ensures the operations and availability of SaaS supporting services leading up to, and after initial implementation - including environments for development and production. This role also ensures the customer receives appropriate and timely application support
services to resolve production issues. During a SaaS implementation program, the AD provides support to the Program Director and program execution team, who are the primary point of contact with the customer; after implementation the AD assumes the role as the primary point of contact with the customer regarding the operation of the SaaS service.
For SaaS customers that have contracted with EIS for customer production application support, the AD ensures that defects caused by customer-specific configurations and extensions are directed to
the appropriate EIS application support engineering staff for resolution. For customers relying on 3rd parties to provide production application support, the AD ensures that the 3rd party is engaged to take ownership of resolution of customer-specific extension issues. For ADs with responsibility for non-SaaS customers (on-premise/license), similar responsibilities apply with the exception of those that directly relate to operational responsibilities for SaaS platforms.
The AD is responsible for deep understanding of the contracted service entitlements of the customer, accountable to ensure that EIS meet these contractual expectations, and is responsible for ensuring delivery of services that fall within the entitlement to the client. The AD serves as the
primary coordinator of services delivery across EIS departments and resources to fulfil contracted services and quote and initiate optional/expanded services. For those services that fall outside of entitlements, the AD is accountable to ensure appropriate invoicing of services and/or negotiation of additional SOWs (lead by the Client Partner) to collect revenue for such services.

HARD SKILLS:

• 7+ years experience in SaaS production support and/or software implementation with clients in leadership position
• Understanding Agile principles and applied knowledge in SDLC and software development methodologies
• Understanding of fundamentals in SaaS, Cloud and distributed Delivery Architecture
• Understanding of best practices in software build processes and CICD principles
• Understanding of business concepts around insurance products, such as Auto, Home, Group Benefits.
• Understanding of ISO 20000 certification and compliance

SOFT SKILLS

• Strong relationship management skills
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Strong management skills to manage and meet deadlines
• Leadership skills to guide and lead others
• Great problem solving capabilities
• Ability and flexibility to quickly react to ever changing landscape
• Customer focus on understanding and meeting their needs

• Support a portfolio (typically 3-5) different SaaS clients;
• Serve as a single point of contact to the client for all SaaS services questions, concerns, requests and issues.
• Be a go-to expert on all aspects of EIS’s contractual obligations with the client; ensures that EIS meet these contractual entitlements and charge appropriately for services outside of entitlements.
• Engage and partner with client, internal and external teams regarding all contracted services
• Responsible for operational gatekeeping in terms of meeting contractual expectations and for ensuring delivery of services fall within the entitlement to the client.
• Engage with EIS Client Partner to grow business engagement and expand SaaS services with the client
• At the Operational level across clients and system integrators, perform initial client onboarding to establish and adhere to production processes including incident/problem management, change management, DevOps, ProdOps, SupportOps, security penetration testing and provide continual operational management of those processes
• Support Client Audit reviews as applicable
• Build and maintain strong relationships with client’s operational and delivery leaders and acts a primary escalation point for issues raised by the client, establish trust and consistency
• Keep abreast of the state of operational performance and availability of the SaaS production system & stay alert to any issues; engage with the SaaS team and customer in a timely fashion for any critical, customer impacting issues.
• Work with customer to identify and implement improvements and eliminate pain points
• Collaborate with product development, Customer Application Support, and SaaS ops teams, and 3rd party support teams (SIs) to ensure adequate resources allocation and availability for application support activities to satisfy SLAs and customer production support contractual obligations
• Act as the voice of the client, collaborating with key internal downstream stakeholders including Customer Application Support, engineering, client partners and finance to provide strategic support, contract changes and conduct quarterly business reviews for supporting client’s strategic roadmap and objectives
• Provide governance review and reporting on all SaaS services to the client, regarding status of all production incidents, activities, progress, risks/issues, keeping all stakeholders informed upon agreed frequency
• Partner with P&T on improving production incidents handling processes with aim to improve efficiency, such as SLAs, cost reduction
• Facilitate and approve all change management and deployment activities initiated by the client for the SaaS production environment including Change Advocacy Board (CAB) processes
• Assist with coordinating EIS base updates as applicable and migration plans between client and internal teams
• Support EIS or Partner Professional Services with coordinating EIS upgrades as applicable and migration plans between client and internal teams
• Provide internal and external support planning for all SaaS operational and maintenance activities
• Accountable to ensure that the operational team executes a root cause analysis (RCA) investigation of all appropriate production incidents, enforcing SLAs with vendors and ensuring that sufficient level of detail is provided in RCAs
• Engage with customer on all production application/infrastructure monitoring and alerting services provided by EIS SaaS services teams
• Advise and plan ongoing training opportunities to the client based on use of EIS and SaaS services
• Attend customer level events and operational summits to ensure production operational topics are planned for and executed