Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Community Support Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Community Support Manager is a customer-obsessed leader who designs, operationalizes, and continually optimizes the end-to-end community and support experience. This role blends strategic planning, hands-on moderation and ticket resolution, content and knowledge base development, cross-functional stakeholder coordination, and people management to increase customer satisfaction, reduce time-to-resolution, and build a thriving, self-sustaining user community. The ideal candidate is data-driven, empathetic, and experienced with modern community platforms (Discord, Slack, Meta, Reddit), helpdesk tools (Zendesk, Intercom), and community metrics (CSAT, NPS, response time).

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Community Specialist / Community Lead
Customer Support Team Lead or Supervisor
Customer Success Manager with community engagement focus

Advancement To:

Head of Community & Support
Director of Customer Experience / Director of Community
VP of Customer Success or Chief Customer Officer (for larger organizations)

Lateral Moves:

Product Manager (Community-led product)
Content Strategy Manager (knowledge base & community content)
Trust & Safety / Moderation Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Own the end-to-end community support strategy across forums, in-app chat, social channels, and public platforms; create and execute quarterly roadmaps that align with product, marketing, and customer success objectives to increase self-service adoption and lower support costs.
Lead, hire, coach, and scale a high-performing community support team; define role-level competencies, career ladders, hiring profiles, performance metrics (CSAT, FRT, TTR), and routine 1:1/feedback processes to improve quality of support and employee retention.
Set measurable SLAs and KPIs for the community and support organization (e.g., CSAT, NPS impact, first response time, resolution time, engagement rate) and deliver regular executive-level reporting and insights to demonstrate ROI.
Design and manage a reliable ticketing workflow (Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk) for community-originated issues, including triage, escalation, labeling, root-cause tagging, and handoffs to product, engineering, or legal when needed.
Serve as the escalation point for high-severity customer issues originating in the community; coordinate cross-functional war rooms and post-incident reviews to reduce recurrence and improve communication to affected customers.
Build and maintain a searchable, SEO-optimized knowledge base and community help content (FAQs, how-tos, troubleshooting guides) to drive self-serve support and reduce inbound tickets; lead content cadence and quality review processes.
Develop and execute moderation policies, safety guidelines, and community code of conduct; train moderators and volunteers on enforcement practices, de-escalation, and bias-aware decision-making.
Partner with product and engineering to triage community feedback, prioritize product improvements, and close the feedback loop by communicating status and outcomes to the community and internal stakeholders.
Create and run community programs (advocates, superuser programs, ambassador initiatives) to increase retention, drive peer-to-peer support, and surface product champions that amplify product adoption and brand trust.
Implement and maintain community analytics with dashboards tracking active users, sentiment trends, tag-based issue volumes, responder performance, and funnel metrics for community-driven conversions.
Lead onboarding and education initiatives for new users via live onboarding sessions, webinars, community AMAs, and interactive tutorials that reduce time-to-value and improve activation rates.
Coordinate with marketing and content teams to amplify community-generated content, success stories, and case studies while ensuring compliance with privacy and brand guidelines.
Create escalation protocols and collaborate with legal, trust & safety, and compliance to manage high-risk behaviors, abuse cases, and policy violations within community channels.
Drive community engagement through proactive programming—challenges, topical discussions, virtual events, and in-person meetups—that aligns with customer lifecycle stages and retention goals.
Manage the community budget, including vendor relationships with platform providers, moderation tools, and third-party service partners to ensure cost-effective scaling of community support.
Conduct continuous training and playbook updates for the support team: troubleshooting flows, tone-of-voice guidelines, templates for responses, and A/B testing of messaging to optimize CSAT and resolution effectiveness.

Secondary Functions

Monitor and respond to social listening alerts and cross-channel mentions to protect brand reputation; synthesize competitive and market signals surfaced by the community into actionable recommendations.
Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory analysis to uncover recurring product issues, feature gaps, or documentation deficiencies; collaborate with analytics to validate hypotheses and quantify impact.
Cultivate relationships with community volunteers and power users to leverage peer support for troubleshooting, content contribution, and event facilitation while ensuring consistent moderation and quality standards.
Contribute to the organization's knowledge management strategy by auditing existing content for accuracy, SEO optimization, and discoverability across help centers, community search, and external search engines.
Collaborate with business units—product, engineering, sales, and marketing—to translate community insights into prioritized engineering tickets, campaign ideas, and product communications.
Participate actively in sprint planning and agile ceremonies when aligning support engineering or product teams to backlog items derived from community feedback and operational issues.
Drive continuous improvement projects to reduce ticket volume through automation (chatbots, macros, triage rules) and process changes; measure uplift and iterate based on impact.
Represent the company externally on panels, webinars, and industry events to showcase community initiatives, recruit advocates, and strengthen employer and product brand positioning.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proven experience managing ticketing systems such as Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, or similar; advanced configuration, macro creation, views, automation, and reporting.
Proficiency with community platforms and chat tools: Discord, Slack, Discourse, Vanilla Forums, Reddit moderation tools, Facebook Groups, Telegram, or similar.
Experience building and maintaining knowledge bases (Help Center, Docs, Notion, Confluence) and writing SEO-optimized self-service content.
Strong data literacy: comfortable with analytics tools (Looker, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Metabase) to build dashboards tracking CSAT, NPS, volume, response time, and escalation patterns.
Familiarity with social listening and sentiment analysis tools (Brandwatch, Sprout Social, Hootsuite) to track brand mentions and emergent issues.
Practical experience implementing and optimizing chatbots and automation workflows for first-response and triage (Ada, Intercom bots, Zendesk Answer Bot).
Solid understanding of customer success and support KPIs (CSAT, NPS, FRT, MTTR, churn reduction) and how community programs influence them.
Knowledge of moderation, trust & safety best practices, and content policy enforcement including privacy, GDPR, and COPPA basics where relevant.
Ability to create structured reports and executive summaries; comfortable with SQL or no-code querying tools to validate hypotheses from community data.
Experience running virtual and in-person events, webinars, and community campaigns including logistics, promotion, and ROI measurement.
Hands-on experience with CRM systems (Salesforce, HubSpot) to coordinate community referrals, escalations, and revenue-impacting issues.

Soft Skills

Exceptional written and verbal communication with a customer-first tone and the ability to craft empathetic, clear responses at scale.
Strong leadership and people management skills: mentoring, conflict resolution, and career development for community and support staff.
High emotional intelligence and de-escalation expertise when handling sensitive or high-stakes community situations.
Strategic thinker who can balance day-to-day operations with long-term community roadmap planning.
Project management discipline: able to run cross-functional initiatives, prioritize backlogs, and hit milestones under ambiguity.
Collaborative mindset: proven track record working with product, engineering, marketing, sales, and legal teams to drive outcomes.
Adaptability and resilience in a fast-paced environment where community sentiment and priorities can change quickly.
Customer-centric problem-solving: uses data and qualitative feedback to iterate on processes and improve the customer experience.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Communications, Marketing, Business, Human-Computer Interaction, or related field OR equivalent professional experience in community/support leadership.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree with coursework in Organizational Behavior, Digital Marketing, Customer Experience, or Data Analytics.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Communications
Marketing
Business Administration
Computer Science / Human-Computer Interaction
Sociology / Psychology (for community behavior insights)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

4–8+ years in community management, customer support, or customer success roles, with at least 2 years leading teams or programs.

Preferred:

6+ years of experience with proven track record managing multi-channel community support operations for consumer or B2B SaaS products, delivering measurable improvements in CSAT, reduction in ticket volume, and growth in community-driven engagement.