Client Services Manager

CleanCounts is hiring a Client Services Manager to lead our Client Services team. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on the quality and consistency of how we support customers, the growth of the people doing that work, and the connection between what we hear from customers and what we build. The right person can run a support operation and step into a hard escalation, and cares as much about developing their team as about closing the queue.

Why This Role Matters

Client Services is the front line of how we understand our customers and the market. The people on this team interact with utilities, brokers, generators, and corporate buyers every day, and the insights they bring back shape how the platform evolves. As our customer base grows, we need someone who owns the whole picture across the team: service quality, escalation judgment, team capability, and the feedback loop into product and engineering.

About CleanCounts

CleanCounts is a 501(c)(4) non-profit that owns and manages an energy attribute certificate and thermal energy certificate tracking system. Our platform is used by Fortune 25 companies, utilities, and regulators, and we support our mission through software that promotes environmental markets and energy sector decarbonization. You will work on projects that matter and help infuse the market with enhanced data and information.

Workplace

Our teams are distributed across North and South America. For team members in Minneapolis, we operate with regular 9-5 hours and a hybrid workplace, with our physical office in the Baker Center in downtown Minneapolis. This role is open to candidates based in Minnesota, Michigan, Virginia, Illinois, or New York, and remote team members travel to Minneapolis three to four times a year for collaboration. We're deeply committed to our clean energy mission, but we're also collaborative, a little nerdy, and genuinely easy to work with.

Job Responsibilities

People Leadership

• Manage, coach, and develop a team of Program Administrators
• Own hiring, onboarding, and ramp for new team members, including the six to twelve month domain ramp this market realistically requires
• Set clear expectations and run consistent one-on-ones, feedback, and performance conversations
• Own coverage and capacity planning across the team, including queue routing, PTO, conference travel, professional development, and volume spikes
• Set expectations for how the team uses AI, coach the people who are further behind on it, and make AI fluency part of how the team develops rather than a side experiment
• Develop people across levels, including growth paths from Program Administrator I to IV and progression into deeper technical or account ownership
• Build depth so that no single customer relationship, registry area, or platform capability depends on one person

Service Delivery and Operations

• Own the health of the customer support queue in HelpScout: response-time targets, escalation paths, tagging conventions, saved replies, and linked help content
• Define and report service metrics that mean something (first response, resolution time, reopen rate, escalation volume) and use them to change how the team works, not just to describe it
• Track customer satisfaction and account health, and report trends to leadership
• Put AI to work in the support operation: drafting and summarizing, triage and routing, surfacing answers from our documentation and ticket history, and finding patterns across the queue that no one has time to read for
• Set the standard for what gets reviewed before it reaches a customer. AI drafts plenty of things well, but registry answers carry regulatory and financial consequence, and accuracy stays the team's responsibility, not the tool's
• Own the escalation path for complex or sensitive customer issues, and step in directly when a situation calls for it
• Maintain the team's documented operating procedures, process documentation, and customer-facing help articles
• Stay close enough to the work to lead it. This role takes the hardest escalations, covers gaps, and spot-checks quality, at roughly 15% direct customer work, but the primary job is running the team and the operation
• Identify gaps, friction points, and quality issues in our processes and platform, and propose fixes - even when no one asked
• Demonstrate an ability to seek out workflow efficiencies, identify tooling and process enhancements, and enhance team effectiveness in delivering on mission and service

Customer and Market Relationships

• Serve as a senior point of contact for significant accounts across utilities, brokers, generators, and corporate buyers
• Handle escalations that require judgment about policy, precedent, or exception, in partnership with Registry and Market Integrity leadership
• Run or oversee platform demos and recurring training sessions for new and existing customers
• Represent CleanCounts at industry conferences and other events as appropriate

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Translate patterns from the support queue into prioritized, evidence-backed feedback for product, policy, data, API, and engineering colleagues, including direct partnership with our Product Owner
• Escalate confirmed platform defects with a clear reproduction case and impact summary
• Partner with Registry and Market Integrity leadership on how registry technical requirements get interpreted and applied consistently across customer situations
• Identify where AI could remove repetitive work from the queue or from customers, and bring those cases to product and engineering with evidence rather than enthusiasm
• All other duties as assigned

Qualifications and Requirements

Leadership

• 7 to 12 years in customer-facing support, service delivery, technical account management, or a comparable operations role, including at least 3 years directly managing people
• Experience managing a team of five or more, including across distinct skill sets, and a demonstrated track record developing individual contributors: hiring, ramping, coaching, and addressing underperformance directly and fairly
• Experience owning a support queue and the service metrics attached to it, and using those metrics to drive change
• Sound judgment about escalation and prioritization, including comfort making decisions without complete information

Technical and Domain

• Technical enough to be useful: able to follow an issue toward root cause, read an error response, and recognize when an answer is not good enough to send
• Comfortable with data: able to pull, read, and question it using tools such as SQL, Excel, or BI platforms
• Practical fluency with AI tools in daily work, and judgment about where they help and where they do not. We use them and we expect you to use them well
• Experience with HelpScout or a comparable ticketing platform (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom)
• Ability to translate technical issues and platform concepts into plain language for readers
• Genuine interest in renewable energy and clean energy markets. Expertise on day one is not required, but we expect most people take 6 to 12 months to feel fully comfortable in this domain, and we plan for that

Team

• Strong process intuition and a track record of identifying improvements without being asked
• Collaborative; comfortable sharing credit, asking for help, and supporting colleagues
• Takes ownership of work and follows through on commitments
• Comfortable operating with moderate structure (we have processes, but we expect people to use judgment)
• Ability to work quickly and accurately in a small team where things change quickly
• Support of and interest in the CleanCounts/M-RETS mission

Bonus Traits

• Working knowledge of clean energy markets, Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), or related compliance frameworks
• Experience building or restructuring a support function, not just running an established one
• Experience with Confluence, Jira, or comparable collaboration platforms
• Experience introducing AI into a support or operations workflow (drafting, deflection, knowledge retrieval, ticket analysis) and measuring whether it actually helped
• Bilingual Spanish proficiency
• Background in energy, environmental, or sustainability space

Additional Information

Reports To: Head of Registry & Market Integrity

Salary Range: $112,000 - $181,000 annually, salary is commensurate with skill and experience level

Employment Type: Full-Time, Exempt

Location: Minneapolis, MN (Baker Center) - Hybrid, preferred; or remote in Michigan, Virginia, Illinois, or New York

Travel Requirements: Remote team members travel to Minneapolis three to four times per year

Work Requirements: Must be legally authorized to work in the US. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide sponsorship opportunities at this time.

Equal Employment Opportunity

CleanCounts does not discriminate in employment on the basis of race, creed, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity/expression), national origin, marital status, familial status, status with regard to public assistance, disability, age, membership on a local human rights commission, and sexual orientation, or any other class protected by federal, state, or local law. This policy applies to all aspects of the application process and employment relationship, including, but not limited to hiring, promotion, transfer, demotion, termination, discipline, benefits, and other terms and conditions of employment.

Benefits:

• 401(k) with employer contribution (7% company contribution, no employee match required)
• Paid Time Off starting at 20 days per year
• Paid holidays
• Health stipend
• Communications stipend
• Parking/Transportation reimbursement
• Professional development budget
• Family and medical leave
• Life insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability coverage

Pay: $112,000.00 - $181,000.00 per year

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Minneapolis, MN 55402