Operational Customer & Complaints Programme Lead

at  Thames Water Utilites

Thames Water is undergoing significant transformation as part of the turnaround of our business. This role specifically supports activities to drive a step change in our operational complaints and wider customer performance.
This role is an important part of helping to improve our performance, responsible for leading projects and programmes to understand ways to improve how we handle complaints across all our operational communication channels and work with business stakeholders to change processes, ways of working, systems and customer journeys.
You will be responsible for coordinating and reporting on the progress we are making regarding our customer measure of experience (C-Mex) improvement plan and key customer improvement activity across Asset Operations & Capital Delivery.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING AS THE OPERATIONAL CUSTOMER & COMPLAINTS PROGRAMME LEAD

• Manage a programme team to deliver high-performance and high-quality of customer service to our operational household customers.
• You will manage change within a dynamic operational environment and build a continuous improvement and transformation culture.
• Collaborative interaction with key stakeholders within operational complaints management, customer contact, and individuals leading customer improvement activity.
• Development and progress reporting of a customer measure of experience (C-Mex) improvement plan ensuring that progress is visible and sustained.
• Engage with operations customer contact, operations case management, complaints handling teams, planning and scheduling teams, field operations teams, management and leadership teams.
• There may also be the opportunity to engage with external stakeholders (for example to learn from other organisations) on customer complaints and C-Mex.
• This role will involve the need to analyse complaints and customer contact processes, procedures, systems and customer journeys and recommend improvements.
• Interpretation of customer data, particularly root cause analysis, customer journeys, and customer experience.
• Producing effective outputs to support project governance and communications.
  This is a hybrid working role with a base location of either Kemble Court, Green Park, Reading (close to M4 Junction 11) or our head office in central Reading (close to Reading train station).
  Working hours are 36 hours per week, Monday to Friday.

WHAT YOU SHOULD BRING TO THE ROLE

• You will have worked at a management level within customer service or customer complaints and have experience developing process improvements.
• Experience in steering regulatory customer improvement (ideally C-Mex or equivalent).
• Ideally this experience has been within an operational business such as the water industry, other utilities, telecommunications or large-scale construction.
• Previous continuous improvement, in service, transformation and project change experience.
• Ability to use data and insight to inform focus areas for improvement.
• A proactive and solutions-focused approach to activities.
• Ability to build cohesive relationships and influence key, high-level internal and external stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to challenge stakeholders constructively for positive customer resolutions.
• Be IT confident with experience in using key applications such as SAP (CRM) and Salesforce. (Work Management)