Customer Experience Communications Operations Manager

ROLE OVERVIEW

As the Customer Experience Communications Operations Manager at Benchling, you will own the communications backbone for our customer base. Benchling ships product updates every day on a continuous release model, and we operate in regulated, validated customer environments where clear and appropriately timed product messaging directly translates to compliance rigor and customer trust. This role makes sure that when something changes, breaks, or ships, there is a defined, well-run process that gets the right message to the right customers on time.

You will own three connected streams: incident communications, where you are accountable for the coverage, quality, and timeliness of what customers hear; change and release communications, where you own a single intake and a tiering system that sizes every change to the right message, audience, channel, and timing; and communications performance, where you own the operating model, dashboards, and retros that tell us whether the system is working and what to fix. You will report to the Leader of CX Operations.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own the incident communications framework: the severity model, playbooks, approved templates, and structure that let any qualified team send accurate customer comms at any hour.

• Hold accountability for coverage, quality, timeliness, and contractual notification windows across all external incident communications, and keep delivery auditable.

• Run a single intake for all customer comms requests (betas, announcements, releases, breaking and disruptive changes) and own the tiering system that sizes each change to the right audience, channel mix, and timing.

• Build and maintain the approved template library so CX teams can send consistent, on-brand messaging on demand without routing every request through Operations.

• Administer and improve the tooling that customer comms run through, and partner with the teams that own our integrations and automation across our tooling stack

• Own the dashboards and reporting that show what is in flight, how fast it went out, and how it landed, and present performance and trends to CX leadership.

• Run comms-lens post-incident reviews and drive the systemic fixes they surface with Product, Engineering, and Support.

• Own the RACI across CX, Product, and Marketing for each comms type

QUALIFICATIONS

Requirements

• 8+ years in customer communications operations, incident or change management, or a comparable operations role in B2B SaaS, ideally at a continuous-release software company.

• Track record of building tiered, repeatable processes, clear RACIs, and performance dashboards.

• Experience getting results through other teams: you define the standard, enable the people who execute it, and hold the bar without absorbing the work yourself.

• Editorial judgment strong enough to set the bar for others. You can read a draft about a dense technical change or an unfolding incident and tell whether it is clear, accurate, and appropriately scoped for a busy scientific audience.

• Comfort operating against contractual notification obligations and in regulated or validated customer environments.

• Hands-on experience across a modern customer stack, for example Salesforce, Zendesk, Gainsight, a status or incident tool, BI and reporting tools, and email or marketing automation.

• You use AI tools in your daily work and actively look for ways to apply them to comms triage, drafting, audience targeting, and performance analysis.

Bonus if you have:

• A background in the life sciences or hands-on experience with scientific R&D workflows, enough to tell a low-risk product change from one that meaningfully changes how a lab works.

• Experience standing up or administering comms tooling such as lifecycle or email orchestration, in-app messaging, or status page platforms.

• SQL or hands-on reporting skills for building comms and incident trend dashboards.

• Prior experience in a customer-facing role (CSM, TAM, Support, Implementation) or familiarity with Benchling's product.

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