Head of Customer Service

Head of Customer Service

Greater Manchester (office based, full time) · £95,000 + benefits

Run the customer service operation for a high-volume competitive consumer retailer. 80+ people across in-house teams and outsourced partners, and a wide range making up the customer base.

The contact profile is broad. Order and delivery questions at volume, returns and refunds, complaints that carry a regulated process and formal deadlines, and queries on products sold by partner brands. Volumes swing hard through peak trading, add all this into a very competitive sector and service has to be flawless.

There is change happening across the business. New technology, a customer function being redesigned, and work underway on how much of the operation sits with outsourced partners. This role plays a part in the delivery of all of it. What it is measured on is the day to day: how fast customers get an answer, how well the operation runs, what it costs, the culture in the teams, and what customers say afterwards.

What you'll own

• Day to day performance of the contact centre across 80+ people: speed of answer, resolution, quality, cost to serve
• What customers tell you, what it means, and getting the causes fixed with the teams that create them
• The culture on the floor: the standard your managers hold, how people are coached, whether good people stay
• The outsourced partner relationships: performance, quality, commercials, and a consistent experience whoever the customer reaches
• Efficiency: forecasting and scheduling through peak, contact reduction, and the balance between automated and human channels
• The structure underneath you and the capability of the managers in it

You'll report to the Customer Experience Director as their number 2. They hold the wider experience and commercial agenda. You hold and stabalise the operation, with the room to run it your way, and involvement in some of the change work wherever it touches service.

The first 12 months

Get hold of the operation and steady the contact types that are costing the business trust. Put measures in place that tell you the truth about performance week to week. Lift the standard of the management layer through investement into cross-training, performance management and upskilling all roles from complaints through to senior managers.

Our ideal applicant

• A service leader who has run a contact centre of similar scale and challange: forecasting, scheduling, quality frameworks, and what moves the numbers week to week
• Has managed outsourced partners on performance, quality and the commercial conversation
• Comfortable with a mixed contact profile, transactional order queries at volume alongside complaints that carry a regulated process
• Builds culture deliberately: coaches managers, holds a standard, and keeps good people in the building
• Runs on numbers and can talk to cost to serve, contact rate and what poor service costs the business
• Steady in a business that is changing around them, and clear on what service needs to stay solid while it does
• A leader who has held consistency of role and lead service delivery through various sizes of teams is crucial for this role

The package

• £95,000 base salary
• Full time, office based in Greater Manchester
• Benefits detail shared on application

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