Customer Support Manager - Aerospace & Defense, MRO (6 month contract)

IFS is hiring a Customer Support Manager for its EMX Support Team on a temporary basis to provide maternity leave coverage. The role leads day-to-day customer support operations, manages cases and escalations, develops team members, and coordinates with internal teams to resolve customer issues and align support processes with IFS standards.

Responsibilities:

• Leading the day-to-day activities of the EMX Support Team, including workload management, case ownership, prioritization, escalations and customer communication
• Providing oversight of customer support cases, incidents and service requests to ensure they are appropriately prioritized, documented and progressed in line with applicable support processes, service-level expectations and quality standards
• Managing customer escalations and complex support situations, coordinating with customers and internal teams to establish clear ownership, next steps and communication
• Ensuring clear, timely and professional customer communication through designated support tools, email and phone, while maintaining a high standard of customer service
• Collaborating with R&D, QA, DB, Consulting and other internal teams to progress customer issues, manage dependencies and remove blockers affecting case resolution
• Supporting and developing Support Team members through coaching, knowledge sharing, workload planning and skills and capability development
• Ensuring appropriate classification and routing of customer requests, including distinguishing standard support work from consulting, implementation, enhancement or product-development activities
• Supporting alignment and consistency of EMX support operations with global IFS standards, including case handling, prioritization, escalation, documentation, knowledge sharing and processes
• Driving continuous improvement by identifying process gaps, recurring issues and opportunities to improve support workflows, documentation, knowledge content and operational practices

Requirements:

• Experience in application support, technical support, service operations or a similar customer-facing support role
• Strong understanding of case ownership, incident handling, customer communication, escalation paths and SLA / KPI-driven service delivery
• Ability to investigate, reproduce and analyse customer issues, including application-level troubleshooting and evidence gathering
• Ability to understand customer operational impacts and translate business issues into technical support activities
• Clear and professional written communication, with strong discipline around case notes, customer updates and audit-ready documentation
• Ability to work effectively with Consulting, R&D, QA, DB and other internal stakeholder groups
• Experience with ServiceNow, Jira or similar work-tracking tools
• A customer-focused, structured and quality-oriented approach, with strong ownership, prioritization and a continuous-improvement mindset
• Experience supporting airlines, MRO providers, business aviation operators or defense aviation organizations
• Knowledge of aircraft maintenance planning, engineering records, maintenance control or continuing airworthiness processes
• Experience working in a regulated or compliance-driven operational environment
• Experience working in an SLA / KPI-driven support environment
• Knowledge of EMX / Empower MX or comparable aviation maintenance management systems
• Knowledge of ITIL or similar practice
• Experience contributing to knowledge management, process improvement or operational standardization