Are you ready to take command of a high-performing service desk operation, lead exceptional teams, and set the gold standard for MSP Service Operations?
This role calls for a decisive, driven, and deeply experienced Service Operations Manager to take ownership of ROCK’s frontline service capability. This isn’t just about keeping the lights on — it’s about transforming how service is delivered, elevating client experience at every touchpoint, and building a culture where every ticket resolved, every SLA met, and every escalation handled is a demonstration of ROCK’s commitment to excellence. If you thrive in fast-paced environments, lead with empathy and accountability, and know how to get the best out of people across multiple teams, this is your stage.
What You Will Be Doing :
You’ll be the operational heartbeat across three critical service functions, ensuring each team performs at its peak and together they deliver a seamless, world-class service experience:
- Premier First Response Team: Our elite frontline unit, delivering rapid, high-quality first contact resolution and setting the tone for every client interaction.
- Advanced Support — 2nd Line: Skilled analysts handling a broad range of client requests and incidents with speed, precision, and a client-first mindset.
- Advanced Support — 3rd Line: Technically proficient engineers resolving complex escalations, acting as the backbone of our service desk’s technical capability.
This is your opportunity to shape the operational engine of ROCK’s Service Operations — driving consistency, accountability, and continuous improvement across every tier of support.
Your Key Responsibilities in Action:
Team Leadership & People Development
- Lead, inspire, and develop the Premier First Response Team and both Advanced Support tiers, fostering a culture of ownership, resilience, and relentless client focus.
- Conduct regular one-to-ones, performance reviews, and skills assessments to ensure every team member is growing, motivated, and set up to succeed.
- Champion a high-performance culture built on accountability, knowledge sharing, and a genuine commitment to outstanding service.
- Identify talent, support career progression pathways, and build team capability to meet the evolving demands of the business.
Day-to-Day Service Desk Operations
- Own the day-to-day running of the MSP service desk, ensuring all teams are resourced, focused, and operating at full capacity.
- Oversee ticket queues, triage workflows, and escalation paths across all support tiers, driving timely and effective resolution.
- Monitor and enforce SLA compliance, proactively identifying risks and taking decisive action to protect client commitments.
- Manage shift patterns, scheduling, and on-call rota to ensure consistent coverage and service continuity at all times.
Technical Understanding, Triage & Remediation:
The Service Operations Manager must be more than an operational leader — they must possess a strong technical foundation that enables them to lead with credibility, accelerate resolution, and guide their teams through complex challenges with confidence.
- Maintain a deep working knowledge of the technology stack underpinning client environments, including infrastructure, networking, cloud platforms, and endpoint management, enabling informed triage and faster escalation decisions.
- Act as a technical anchor during major incidents and complex escalations — able to quickly assess impact, identify likely root cause, and direct the right resources to resolution.
- Understand and apply structured triage methodologies across all support tiers, ensuring consistent diagnostic approaches that reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
- Work closely with 3rd line engineers to bridge the gap between technical complexity and operational execution — translating technical findings into clear actions and client communications.
- Ensure runbooks, escalation procedures, and known-error databases are technically accurate, regularly reviewed, and actively used by teams to drive consistent, repeatable remediation.
- Champion a culture of technical curiosity — encouraging engineers to understand the ‘why’ behind issues, not just the fix, building deeper capability across the desk over time.
- Identify patterns in recurring incidents and work with technical leadership to drive root cause elimination, reducing ticket volume and improving platform stability for clients.
Scaling the Operational Desk: Automation & Systemisation:
As ROCK grows, so must the operational model. You will be a key driver in designing and implementing the systems, automations, and processes that allow the service desk to scale efficiently without sacrificing quality or client experience.
- Develop and execute a scalable operational framework — building processes, workflows, and governance structures that support growth across headcount, client base, and service complexity.
- Identify and implement automation opportunities across the service desk, including ticket routing, categorisation, alert handling, and first-line response, reducing manual effort and accelerating resolution.
- Lead the adoption and optimisation of AI-assisted tooling, including intelligent triage, predictive alerting, and self-service/chatbot capabilities, driving measurable improvements in efficiency and client satisfaction.
- Work with PSA and RMM platforms (e.g. ConnectWise, HaloPSA, Autotask) to build and refine automated workflows, escalation rules, and reporting pipelines that reduce operational friction.
- Design and maintain a systemised knowledge base — ensuring tribal knowledge is codified into structured, searchable, and continuously improved documentation accessible to all tiers.
- Define and track operational metrics that reflect desk health at scale, including automation adoption rates, self-resolution rates, and engineer productivity ratios.
- Partner with technical and product leadership to evaluate new tooling and integrations that drive desk capability, ensuring the operational environment evolves in line with the business.
- Build onboarding and training frameworks that enable rapid ramp-up of new team members, reducing time-to-productivity and maintaining quality standards as the team scales.
Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement
- Drive continuous improvement across processes, tooling, and workflows, embedding efficiency and best practice at every level of the service desk.
- Leverage automation and AI-driven tooling to enhance ticket handling, reduce resolution times, and elevate the overall client experience.
- Develop and maintain operational runbooks, escalation procedures, and service standards to ensure consistency and repeatability.
- Analyse service desk metrics and reporting data to identify trends, root causes, and opportunities for performance uplift.
Client Experience & Stakeholder Collaboration
- Act as the senior escalation point for complex or high-priority incidents, ensuring swift resolution and clear, proactive client communication.
- Collaborate closely with account managers, technical teams, and leadership to deliver a unified, consistently excellent client experience.
- Translate operational performance data into clear, meaningful insight for both internal stakeholders and clients.
What You Need to Succeed
- A passion for delivering consistent exceptional service at scale.
- Exceptional technical knowledge and understanding, ideally equivalent to 3rd line or specialist level, with the ability to credibly engage across infrastructure, networking, and cloud environments.
- A proven ability to triage and remediate technical challenges — understanding root cause, directing resolution, and building lasting fixes rather than workarounds.
- 3+ years in a service desk management or operations leadership role within an MSP or IT services environment.
- Proven track record of managing multi-tiered support teams, with experience overseeing 1st, 2nd, and 3rd line operations.
- Strong understanding of ITIL frameworks, SLA management, and MSP Service Operations models.
- Demonstrable ability to lead, coach, and develop people — building teams that are both high-performing and highly engaged.
- Hands-on experience with PSA and RMM tooling (e.g. ConnectWise, Autotask, HaloPSA) and a strong working knowledge of common MSP toolsets.
- Demonstrated experience in scaling an operational service desk — designing automation workflows, systemising processes, and building frameworks that support growth without sacrificing quality.
- A track record of implementing or optimising automation and AI-driven tooling within a service desk context, with measurable impact on efficiency or resolution times.
- Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to manage competing priorities, remain calm under pressure, and inspire confidence in your teams and clients.
- Experience working in a high-growth MSP environment where change is constant and pace is relentless.
- Familiarity with AI-driven service desk tooling, automation workflows, or chatbot/self-service implementations.
- A technical background in infrastructure, networking, or cloud platforms that enables credibility and effective communication with engineering teams.
- Relevant certifications such as ITIL Foundation (or above), or a working knowledge of ITIL practices.