Customer Care Manager Job Description

A Customer Care Manager runs the function that answers to customers once they are on the books: the contact center, the escalation desk, and sometimes the billing and account-resolution work behind the calls. The manager owns the staffing plan, the quality program, the service targets and the supervisors and agents who hit or miss them. O*NET's Job Titles file places Customer Care Manager under First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers, the same occupation that holds Customer Service Manager and Call Center Manager, so the title alone says little about scope. The duties list says the rest.

A public example shows how wide that scope can run. The City of Roseville, California, wrote a Customer Care Manager class to plan, organize, direct and coordinate the Utilities Customer Care Division inside its Electric Utilities Department. The class spec puts customer service, call center, billing, credit and collections, field services and rates implementation under the job, for electric, waste services, wastewater and water customers. The same manager prepares the division budget, recommends appointments, conducts performance evaluations and reports to the Assistant Utility Director.

Day to day, the work splits into three streams. The first is the queue. The manager reviews the forecast against actual contact volume, approves schedule changes, moves agents between phone, chat, email and callback work when a backlog builds, and decides when to pull people off the phones for training or coaching without blowing the service level for the afternoon.

The second stream is quality. Supervisors and quality analysts score recorded calls, chat transcripts and email replies, and the care manager runs the calibration sessions that keep those scores consistent from one reviewer to the next. When the same mistake shows up across many agents, the fix may be a rewritten knowledge-base article, a revised script or a short refresher rather than another round of individual coaching.

The third stream is the business behind the contacts. A confusing bill, a late shipment, a broken password reset or a new rate schedule shows up first as a spike in calls. The care manager is the person who traces that spike to its source, puts numbers on it and presses the owning team, whether billing, IT, product or field operations, for a durable fix. This is the part of the job aimed at next month's volume, not today's.

Escalations sit across all three. A customer who has been bounced twice, a disputed shutoff, a complaint copied to an executive or a regulator: these reach the care manager's desk, and the manager decides on credits, payment arrangements or exceptions within the authority the policy grants. Each one is also a data point about where the process failed.

The rest is people management: hiring and onboarding agents, coaching supervisors, approving time off, writing reviews, handling discipline with human resources and keeping a team engaged in work that can be repetitive and emotionally draining.

Education. A bachelor's degree in business administration, communications, finance or a related field is the usual guidance for a manager title; a long record of running teams is the alternative route. Roseville's class spec is one concrete example: it asks for a bachelor's degree, preferably with coursework in finance, accounting or business administration, plus five years of increasingly responsible customer service experience that includes two years of supervisory responsibility. It lists electric or water utility customer service experience as preferred.

Typical path. As a rough guide, people reach this title after 5 to 8 years in customer-facing work, moving from agent to senior agent or team lead, then to supervisor of a shift or queue, then to the manager who runs several supervisors. Time spent in workforce management, quality assurance or training is a useful detour, because each one teaches a piece of the operation a care manager has to run without help.

Industry knowledge. The rules that agents apply come from the business, and the manager has to know them cold. In a utility that means rate structures, deposits, payment plans and disconnection procedures; in a health plan, benefits, claims and grievance rules; in a bank, disputes and account servicing policy. Roseville's spec lists knowledge of utility rate structures and of pertinent local, state and federal laws, ordinances and rules among its minimum qualifications.

Systems. Expect to work inside a CRM or case tool such as Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service; a contact center platform such as Genesys Cloud, NICE CXone, Five9 or Amazon Connect; a workforce management module for forecasting and scheduling; and a quality or speech analytics tool. Care managers in billing-heavy settings also live in the billing system itself. Comfort with spreadsheets and a reporting tool such as Power BI or Tableau matters, because the manager builds the weekly story the numbers tell.

Credentials. No license is required for the role. Two optional certifications fit it:

• CCXP, the Certified Customer Experience Professional credential awarded by the Customer Experience Professionals Association.
• HDI Support Center Manager, awarded by HDI.

Skills that matter. Reading an interval report and knowing which agent to move. Writing a policy exception memo that finance will sign. Running a calibration meeting where three supervisors score the same call three ways. Telling an agent, kindly and specifically, what went wrong on a call, then following up a week later. Explaining to a vice president why a billing change will send a wave of extra calls to the contact center, with evidence rather than adjectives.

BLS does not count customer care managers separately. O*NET reports figures for the occupation the title sits in, First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers: employment of 1,506,100 in 2025, projected growth over 2025 to 2035 of little or no change, and about 127,400 openings a year on average. A flat projection, then, still comes with a steady flow of openings.

Setting matters for pay. In the May 2025 BLS industry estimates for the same occupation, the median wage was $99,990 in utilities, $80,360 at insurance carriers and $62,500 in ambulatory health care services. Those figures cover every office and administrative supervisor in those industries, not care managers alone, but they show how far apart the same supervisory occupation can sit from one industry to the next.

On artificial intelligence, one large payroll study points to hiring, not firing. The August 2026 version of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab paper "Canaries in the Coal Mine?" uses ADP payroll data on millions of U.S. workers through June 2026. It reports that employment of workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations stands 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers, that the gap works mainly through reduced hiring of young workers rather than more separations, and that experienced workers show no comparable gap. Customer service representatives appear among the occupations in its highest AI-exposure quintile. The authors call these findings early, descriptive indicators rather than causal estimates.

For a care manager, that reads as a planning problem more than a verdict. A team that hires fewer entry-level agents has fewer future leads and supervisors coming up through it, and in a team with self-service in front, the contacts that reach a person are the ones automation could not settle. The practical response is to redesign training around those harder contacts, measure how automated channels hand customers off, and show leadership what a deflected contact actually saves.

Next steps from the title include senior manager over several sites or lines of business, director of customer care or customer experience, and operations roles that own billing, collections or service delivery end to end. Sideways moves into workforce management, quality or CX analytics are another route, where the contact-center data a care manager already knows becomes the main product. So is a move into the business the care team supported, for example a utility's billing operation or a health plan's member services leadership.

Each of those roles asks for something a care manager already does weekly: connecting the care operation's numbers to the company's, in cost per contact, collections recovered, complaints avoided and customers retained.

Dear Hiring Committee,

I am applying for the Customer Care Manager position with your utilities department. For the past four years I have managed the customer contact team at Lakeshore Municipal Power and Water, a fictional utility in this example, where I lead three supervisors and a team of agents handling phone, email and web chat for residential and commercial accounts.

The part of the work I am proudest of is the part customers never see. Early in my tenure, our team was taking a wave of calls every billing cycle from customers confused by estimated reads. Rather than add staff for the surge, I sat down with our billing and metering supervisors, mapped which accounts were getting estimated and why, and helped rewrite the bill message and the letter that went out with it. The surge shrank over the next two cycles, and the agents who had been absorbing those calls moved to payment arrangements and backlog work.

I also rebuilt our quality program. Our supervisors were scoring the same calls very differently, so I started monthly calibration sessions, cut the scorecard down to the behaviors that actually predicted repeat calls, and paired every low score with a coaching note the agent could act on. Morale on the floor improved because the feedback finally felt fair.

On the people side, I hire, train and review my own staff, and I have handled discipline and accommodation cases with human resources by the book. I write the division's monthly performance report and present it to our assistant director, including where we missed and what we changed.

I would welcome the chance to bring that mix of operations discipline and cross-department problem solving to your division, and to learn your rate structures and billing systems from the people who know them best.

Sincerely, Jordan Avery