Front Line Support Manager

Job Description

Key Responsibilities

1. Team Leadership and People Management

• Lead, mentor and develop second-line Team Leads, holding them accountable for the performance and development of their own teams.
• Lead, develop and empower a team of frontline support analysts with specialties in customer technical support and editorial support.
• Provide regular coaching, training and performance evaluations.
• Own team scheduling and shift design to ensure adequate coverage across all support channels and the APAC, EMEA and AMERS shift boundaries, including handover quality between regions.
• Develop, implement and refine service and operating level KPIs to improve service delivery and response times.
• Translate Reuters Customer Solutions priorities into the frontline operating plan, including performance standards, process improvement and resource recommendations.
• Own frontline hiring: define role requirements, lead selection and make hiring decisions for analyst and lead vacancies. Design structured onboarding so new hires reach competence on a documented timeline, not by osmosis.
• Build succession depth and leadership capability within the frontline team.
• Address employee concerns directly and manage workplace issues, including formal grievances, with fairness and timely resolution.
• Single point of contact and site coordinator for Reuters staff in Manila ensuring safety and liaison with local site leaders.

2. Incident and Problem Management

• Ensure timely resolution of customer inquiries and incidents in line with SLAs and ITIL frameworks.
• Escalate complex issues to second-level support with complete context. An escalation is a warm handoff with documented diagnostics, not a reassigned ticket.
• Manage high-severity incident swarming and stakeholder communication. For P1 incidents the frontline manager is the initial incident coordinator until a formal Incident Manager joins.
• Own first-level incident, problem and feedback processes within the service management process stack. Drive continuous improvement.
• Raise, own and drive Problem records to closure in the work management system — stated root cause, agreed acceptable level, quantified remediation benefit.
• Identify recurring themes across the organization and convert them into problem prevention rather than repeat incident handling.

3. Capacity, Data and Reporting Ownership

• Own the frontline capacity model: documented success definition, key metrics, warning and breaking thresholds at analyst, team and functional-area level.
• Produce frontline reporting end to end. Build and maintain it yourself or through your Team Leads. Reporting accountability does not transfer to an analyst or a shared resource.
• Forecast resource needs and manage the allocated frontline operating budget.
• Maintain a defensible baseline for every headline metric. State the population a figure measures whenever it is presented.
• Reconcile conflicting figures before they are reported upward. Flag data limitations without being asked.
• Perform and document root-cause analysis on volume drivers. Quantify what a remediation removes and what that effort buys.
• Generate reporting on team performance, incident trends and service improvements to a cadence agreed with the Director of Service Enablement.

4. Customer Experience, Quality and Knowledge

• Own the frontline approach to customer experience, using feedback, satisfaction scores, support NPS and service data to identify friction and prioritize improvement.
• Turn service insight into actions that reduce customer effort, protect at-risk relationships and strengthen support’s contribution to retention.
• Own the quality assurance regime: audit coverage, calibration between Team Leads, targeted remediation where quality trends move.
• Set and enforce ticket documentation standards. A case with incomplete notes cannot be handed off, audited or learned from. This is non-negotiable.
• Maintain the frontline knowledge base. Ensure analysts contribute solutions from resolved cases and consult existing articles before reinventing answers.
• Partner with Sales, Product and Technology on material customer issues, ensuring frontline evidence informs recovery plans and product decisions. Feed product-specific support patterns to Product and Engineering so recurring issues inform the development backlog, not only the support queue.

5. Process Optimization, Automation and AI Enablement

• Own the AI and automation roadmap for frontline support, focused on speed, consistency and confidence in time-sensitive news.
• Identify repetitive case patterns. Eliminate them through automation, filtering or self-service in preference to reducing the effort each one takes.
• Establish the trusted knowledge base, data quality, case taxonomy and workflow discipline that AI assistance and automation require.
• Deploy AI for knowledge retrieval, case summarization, pattern detection and next-action guidance while preserving human judgment on escalation and risk.
• Size opportunities with evidence before deployment. Validate service, capacity and customer outcomes after.

6. Governance, Commitments and Stakeholder Collaboration

• Represent the frontline organization in recurring governance forums, arriving with a dated position on open items rather than a status narrative.
• Own dated commitments across multiple governance forums. Offer a target date without being asked and report status against it unprompted. Where a date cannot yet be committed, state a soft target and the uncertainty behind it.
• Partner with Product, Technology and Sales to address support-related challenges.
• Prepare the frontline input to business cases and investment recommendations when requested by the Director of Service Enablement.
• Participate in service reviews and contribute to service improvement initiatives.
• Communicate bi-directionally between the team and senior leadership, and across peer functions.

Required Qualifications

• More than 3 years in a leadership or managerial position, including demonstrable experience managing team leads or other people managers.
• Experience leading a distributed team across multiple time zones, with accountability for coverage and handover between regions.
• Demonstrated ownership of workforce capacity or productivity modeling, and comfort defending the assumptions behind it.
• Strong data literacy: able to build reporting, reconcile conflicting figures, and identify when a number does not support the conclusion drawn from it.
• Over 5 years of experience in IT support or helpdesk roles, preferably in a media environment.
• Significant experience performing root cause analysis in a customer support environment.
• Experience connecting service performance and customer feedback to retention or relationship outcomes.
• Experience hiring, onboarding and building support teams, including defining role requirements and leading selection.
• Strong verbal and written communication and problem-solving skills.
• Proficiency in CRM and ticketing platforms such as Salesforce and ServiceNow.
• English required (written and verbal).
• Higher education in Computer Science, Information Technology, Journalism or a related field.
• Knowledge of Windows and macOS operating systems. Familiarity with fundamental network concepts (TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP) and IT security best practices.
• Able to work productively both independently and in close collaboration, in a fast-paced, customer-driven and sometimes unpredictable environment.
• Flexible for hybrid work schedules, accommodating both in-office and remote work.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with ITIL-based service management frameworks; ITIL Foundation certification.
• Practical experience applying AI-assisted support tools in a customer environment, including sizing the opportunity, maintaining human oversight and validating results after deployment.
• A basic understanding of journalistic practices and news production workflows, or experience supporting a newsroom or journalists.
• Experience with content management systems, digital asset management and media production software.
• Additional languages, including Filipino.

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What’s in it For You?

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Thomson Reuters informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. We serve professionals across legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media. Our products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data, intelligence, and solutions needed to make informed decisions, and to help institutions in their pursuit of justice, truth, and transparency. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is a world leading provider of trusted journalism and news.

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