Director Of Customer Contact & Resolution

Director of Customer Contact and Resolution

Contract Type: Permanent

Salary: Competitive

Working Hours: 35 hrs per week

Working Pattern: Monday-Friday Hybrid

Location: Base anywhere in the UK and national travel required

Does your vision match ours? Are you passionate about exceptional customer service?

At Riverside, we’re a housing association with a difference – enhancing the everyday for all our customers. For over 90 years, we’ve been revitalising neighbourhoods and supporting communities by providing the homes they need to live fulfilling and rewarding lives.

In addition, we have a portfolio of over 75,000 affordable residential and retirement homes across the UK. Our work ranges from homelessness services to social care, employment support to retirement living.

If you share our values and are excited about making a significant impact as the Director of Customer Contact and Resolution, we encourage you to apply with your CV and cover letter. We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet all the criteria on the job description, at Riverside we recruit to potential not just on skills and experience.

This role also falls under our Ethnic Diversity guaranteed interview scheme. If you are Ethnically Diverse and demonstrate you meet the minimum criteria for the role you will be guaranteed an interview.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Our Customer Contact & Resolution Directorate of circa 200 colleagues is responsible for front line customer enquiries and complaints handling, via telephony and digital channels. We strive for best practice in our sector through our 24/7 Customer Service Centre, based across four locations, helping to deliver the Riverside vision of Transforming lives and Revitalising Neighbourhoods.

You will be accountable for developing and delivering our digital and Customer Contact strategies, and ensuring delivery of a high quality, customer centric complaints handling service. You will champion continuous improvements to service delivery, striving to ensure equity of service for our diverse range of Customers, making it easy to deal with us.

As a member of the Customer Service Senior Leadership Team, you will work collaboratively across the organisation to enhance our customers’ experiences of our services, role modelling our values while relentlessly reducing waste and improving value for money.

ABOUT YOU

As an experienced Customer Service Director, you will be able to demonstrate that you have successfully managed large scale, multi-site customer service teams. Alongside this, you will have a proven record in improving and delivering digital services and you constantly drive to improve service delivery for customers with wide ranging needs and expectations to make life easier for them.

The successful applicant will have experience of working at pace and leading significant change projects & programmes to successfully deliver expected benefits alongside a strong commercial acumen and are a collaborative person with excellent stakeholder management skills. Furthermore, you will be an inspirational leader committed to delivering the very best in class service aligned to our Values., supporting and shaping engagement and culture across our business.

For full details, please see below the role profile, or contact Fern.Kearney@riverside.org.uk for the job description.

Role Profile

• Champion the customer, leading by example to create a strong customer-centric culture in the Customer Contact & Resolution Directorate, ensuring colleague behaviour reflects our values, and that service delivery remains responsive to the diverse needs and experiences of Customers.
• Lead the Customer Contact & Resolution Directorate to deliver professional, accessible and efficient query management, driving up customer satisfaction with ease of access to services, while reducing cost to serve.
• Oversee the development and delivery of our customer digital strategy and our multi-channel Customer Contact strategy, working in partnership with other teams to achieve targets.
• Be the strategic owner of our complaints process, maintaining high standards in complaint management and in the quality of our correspondence with the Housing Ombudsman. Ensure that the organisation demonstrates learning from our complaints, and regularly provides evidence of how we have acted on this learning to our customers.
• Work with Senior Leaders to ensure the development and delivery of plans to improve the customer experience, looking across the sector and at other service industries to identify and implement best practice, and both encouraging and responding to customer feedback, to drive our customer satisfaction and our service delivery standards to top quartile performance.
• Lead on continuous improvement for the Customer Service team, analysing contact data to identify ways to eliminate waste, working with other teams to deliver improvements to processes and systems.
• Be a proactive member, contributing to the leadership of The Riverside Group, making a visible contribution to its strategic direction and success, seeking to bring challenge and innovation to the achievement of Group-wide objectives, and enabling Riverside to fulfil its role influencing and shaping national policy.
• Be accountable for the development of business plans, setting and delivering against budgets and monitoring and reporting on key performance indicators to Executive Directors and the relevant governance structures on your areas.
• Lead, manage and motivate a highly skilled and adaptive team. Provide clear direction and regular communication and engagement opportunities, reviewing work outputs, setting improvement targets and appraising individual performance.
• Lead the Customer Contact & Resolution Directorate to inform, contribute to and /or own and deliver plans and strategies in line with corporate frameworks, such as Risk Registers, Business Continuity Plans, Service Improvement plans etc. Ensure compliance with Group requirements in health & safety, safeguarding, equality & diversity, and data protection.

Person specification

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

Essential

• Demonstrable commitment to the Riverside Values
• Extensive Customer Services background, with substantial experience in a senior leadership position within a large, complex and multi-site customer service organisation.
• Experience of delivering services in a regulated service sector
• Proven ability to develop and deliver a successful digital customer strategy
• Proven ability to provide inspirational leadership, culture change and support high colleague engagement.
• Evidence of working at pace and leading significant projects & programmes to successfully deliver expected benefits.
• Excellent stakeholder management, with the interpersonal skills and gravitas to influence a wide range of stakeholders.
• High commercial acumen, managing costs while maintaining service standards in a challenging economic environment.
• Able to understand the context of social housing and the challenges it faces, and a knowledge of relevant legislation and regulatory requirements.
• Excellent communication skills able to write and deliver professional, quality reports and presentations to Executive Team, Governance Community etc.
• A willingness to work towards the attainment of a formal Housing Qualification

Desirable

• Experience of working in the social housing sector
• Experience of Highly Unionised environments
• Housing Management Qualification
• Membership of a relevant professional organisation