Vice President of Customer Support and Distribution
CLARK Material Handling CompanyThe Vice President, Customer Support & Distribution is the executive owner of the customer experience after the sale and the leader accountable for CLARK's Urgent Customer Service strategic priority. This role provides leadership for the aftermarket parts business, the parts distribution warehouse, and Product Support, including warranty administration, technical training, customer technical service, and technical publications. The Vice President will connect these functions into one customer-focused operating system that improves responsiveness, parts availability, issue resolution, dealer capability, and long-term customer loyalty. Working cross-functionally with Sales, Quality, Engineering, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Finance, and the dealer network, this leader will ensure that post-sale customer needs have clear ownership, timely escalation, and measurable resolution. Essential Functions: • Provide executive leadership for the complete post-sale customer experience, establishing priorities, service standards, and accountability across Parts, Distribution, and Product Support. • Lead the aftermarket parts business, including parts sales growth, pricing and margin performance, product-line development, dealer programs, purchasing coordination, inventory strategy, and commercial execution. • Direct the parts distribution warehouse and related operations, with responsibility for safety, service levels, order accuracy, productivity, capacity, inventory accuracy, fill rate, backorders, freight performance, and continuous improvement. • Lead Product Support operations, including warranty administration, customer technical service, technical training, field technical support, and technical publications. • Serve as the executive owner for urgent dealer and customer escalations after the sale, ensuring each critical issue has a named owner, containment plan, communication cadence, target resolution date, and documented closure. • Create a unified intake, prioritization, escalation, and closure process for issues that cross Product Support, Parts, Distribution, Quality, Engineering, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, and Sales. • Develop and maintain a customer experience scorecard that includes service responsiveness, trucks out of service, escalation aging, first-contact response, parts availability, backorders, warranty cycle time, training effectiveness, publication readiness, and dealer satisfaction measures. • Partner with Quality and Engineering to convert field failures, warranty trends, dealer feedback, and technical support data into root-cause corrective actions and preventive improvements. • Partner with Sales and dealer leadership to identify post-sale obstacles to market share growth, improve dealer service capability, and protect strategic customer relationships. • Establish an operating cadence for dealer and customer issue resolution, including weekly escalation review, aging analysis, action tracking, and executive reporting on systemic risks and trends. • Develop a dealer capability strategy covering technical training, service readiness, parts support, product launch preparation, diagnostic resources, and access to current technical publications. • Ensure technical publications, service information, training content, and diagnostic guidance are accurate, current, accessible, and released in time to support product launches and field service needs. • Improve warranty administration through clear policies, efficient claim processing, sound controls, transparent communication, timely disposition, and feedback loops that support Quality and Engineering. • Lead distribution network and facility improvement initiatives related to parts availability, warehouse capacity, layout, technology, automation, business continuity, and future facility transitions. • Use data, digital tools, and AI-enabled capabilities to improve forecasting, inventory deployment, dealer self-service, knowledge access, issue trend detection, and respon…