Head of Customer Contact

What you’ll be responsible for

Providing leadership and direction to Welsh Water’s Customer Hwb, which handles over 1m billing and service contacts each year, and ensuring that it achieves its key performance indicators and other business objectives.  The Customer Hwb plays an important part in ensuring that Welsh Water’s customers receive consistently high levels of service across traditional and digital channels 24 hours a day.  You will be expected to build and maintain a culture of continuous improvement that ensures that these services evolve to meet changing needs and expectations of our customers, developing strategies to improve customer satisfaction and achieving performance targets.  This role requires someone with strong leadership, strategic thinking and exceptional communication skills.

As a member of the Retail Leadership Team, you will have joint accountability for the delivery of the business unit business plan.  You will be responsible for developing and implementing the customer contact strategy for the Retail business into the next price review period (AMP8 – 2025 to 2030). 

This will include:

Retail Leadership Team

•    Working with the Retail Leadership team and DCWW to set and achieve objectives within the strategic 5-year plan.
•    Leading the delivery of operations across the Customer Hwb teams.
•    Delivery of cost, service and collections KPIs.
•    Provide leadership and direction to the department and developing the capabilities necessary to deliver the business’s short-, medium- and long-term objectives.
•    Creating and implementing performance strategies to achieve desired outcomes.
•    Driving performance and operational excellence initiatives to continually improve service quality and efficiency, in particular improving First Contact Resolution and establishing a culture that improves customer experience.
•    Coaching and developing the performance of the Customer Hwb teams; creating and maintaining an accountable and high performing team; and ensuring that there is a development framework that maximises talent from within and builds knowledge and confidence of advisors.
•    Champion and act as an example of Welsh Water’s core values and ethics.
•    Promoting a culture of continuous improvement and behaviours to create an empowered, positive and engaged workforce.
•    Sponsorship of key business and technology projects to improve customer experience and reduce costs.

Customer Contact

•    Developing and implementing the customer contact strategy that supports short, medium and long term objectives of the Retail business, ensuring that this strategy keeps abreast of emerging contact centre technologies.
•    Utilise customer feedback to improve the service we provide and drive improvements across the Customer Hwb.
•    Preparing and presenting reports on performance, insight and trends as required to the Dwr Cymru Executive and Glas Board.
 

Who you’ll work with

Internal
•    Retail Leadership Team and department managers
•    DCWW Exec team  
•    Business wide Heads of Service 
•    DCWW Finance, HR, ITS Water and Waste teams 

External
•    Customers 
•    Auditors 
•    IT service providers 
•    Offshore service provider
•    Welsh Contact Centre Forum
•    Other Customer Centre leads within the Water sector 
•    Consumer Council for Water
•    Welsh Language Board
 

About you

Experience

• Minimum of 5 years’ experience of operational management and leadership gained within a large customer contact environment across multiple skill sets and disciplines        
• Extensive multi-channel experience, within performance driven environment        
• Experience of managing and building relationships with key stakeholders, such as board directors and regulators        
• Proven and strategic hands-on operations and customer relationship and stakeholder management experience        
• Experience of driving significant improvement in performance and behavioural change        
• Experience of implementing large scale system and cultural change        
• Experience of managing, coaching and mentoring staff 

        
Knowledge & Skills

• Good understanding of contact centre technologies, including their application into a busy operational environment        
• Strong written and verbal communication skills    
• Good analytical skills and knowledge of the interdependencies across contact centre performance data        
• Excellent leadership skills and proven experience of developing high performing teams        
• Personal integrity and able to gain trust at all levels of the organisation.    
• Influencing and negotiation skills to gain commitment from third parties and employees at all levels.              
• Collaborative; creating working relationships across all areas of the business to achieve results and reduce conflict.    
• Organised and able to manage workloads to meet deadlines and respond to a rapidly changing environment        

Qualifications (desirable) 

• Educated to degree level or QBE  ( over 5 years in a senior leadership role)         
• Membership of appropriate customer service professional body
   

What you'll deliver

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) 
•    Customer satisfaction as measured by Ofwat’s Customer Measure of Experience (C-MeX)
•    Number of customers registered for Welsh Language services (company performance commitment)
•    Annual reduction in cost to serve measures as defined in the 5 year plan
•    Contact centre measures of efficiency and effectiveness (such as complaints, first contact resolution)
•    Annual departmental budget
•    Employee engagement

Budget and Finances: 

•    Circa £7m OPEX 
•    230 FTE

Benefits

As well as a market competitive salary, 33 days annual leave (pro rata, including public holidays), we offer a range of employee benefits and rewards including:

•    Variable pay schemes ((your salary band will remain the same, but performance depending, you could receive an incremental within-band increase and a yearly incentive)
•    Option to buy additional annual leave up to 5 days per year
•    Enhanced employer pension contributions – Up to 11% employer contributions
•    Enhanced family friendly policies
•    Progression opportunities, including the ability to apply for funded training and coaching and mentoring programmes
•    Reduction on gym memberships and high street shopping
•    Cycle to work scheme
•    Free on-site parking at all our sites
•    Discount off all Welsh Water visitor attraction centres and gift shops
•    Car-leasing scheme
•    Health CashBack scheme
•    An employee assistance programme for employees and their immediate family

Whilst also working for a not-for profit company that truly cares about earning the trust of customers everyday, and about looking after our beautiful environment

Please note, we may close this role sooner if required. We may also extend the original closing date depending on interest.

Who we are

Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water keep 3 million people healthy each day with safe, reliable water, and take away wastewater to clean, before returning it safely to our beautiful rivers and seas.

To be able to deliver high quality, essential services which help to protect the health of our customers, colleagues and our environment, we need the right people to deliver on our vision.  This is achieved by living our core values and demonstrating the core behaviours that underpin them.  The security of our people, assets and information is key to us, so we are looking for people who understand and comply with the company’s required security objectives.

We know that the most successful teams are the most diverse teams. Equality, diversity and inclusion provide the very foundation to our culture at Welsh Water. We want every individual to feel confident, proud and able to bring their whole selves to work. 

To ensure an improved representation in our workforce, applications are particularly welcome from minority groups including Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people, Females, LGBT+, Non-binary and people with disabilities. Together we continue to build a workplace that not only celebrates the diverse voices of our colleagues but also represents each customer we serve.

In essence, ours is a company based on trust, openness, respect, commitment and honesty. A company that our colleagues are proud to work for.

INDMP