Job Description
Service Managers take responsibility for the end to end customer experience. They act as customer champions within the Organisation ,making sure we continually meet expectations and contractual obligations. A Service Manager engages with all functions of the service lifecycle and ensures the processes and technology are suitable for business and customer needs.
Key Responsibilities
- Relationship management
- Develop customer relationships based on trust, confidence and mutual respect.
- Maintain a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s strategy, commercial drivers, market and challenges with particular focus on the development of a strategic partnership.
- Act as the customers’ advocate ensuring that their current and future business requirements and service expectations are understood by the relevant operational and support teams.
- Anticipate service management challenges and feed into the Consulting service issues/ideas for improvement.
- Ensure high levels of communication with customers are maintained at all times.
- Ensure customer issues are handled in a professional, timely and effective manner.
- Proactively work with sales to identify additional products/services that will enhance your customer experience.
Service Level Management
- Track and ensure that contractual commitments and service levels are being met.
- Proactively analyse performance data to identify recurrent problems to prepare for potential capacity and performance issues.
- Drive root cause analysis with Problem Management to ensure repeat problems are addressed proactively.
- Act as an escalation point to ensure a quick and timely resolution of incidents or enquiries.
- Liaise with key stakeholders and where necessary drive internal teams to resolve issues as a priority.
- Handle customer complaints to resolution without further escalating issues.
- Participate in commercial, security and future development discussions.
- Build comprehensive knowledge of the customer’s use of the standard and bespoke services.
- Participate in the overall transition of new or changed customer services into BAU.
- Continually maintain and measure customer satisfaction.
Continuous Service Improvement
- Proactively analyse performance and customer feedback data to identify areas we can improve.
- Work with internal teams to develop improvement plans.
- Monitor, report on and manage progress against agreed improvement plans.
- Keep any improvement plan documents/trackers accurate and up to date.
- Engage the relevant operational teams required to deliver the necessary improvements and ensure buy in or support is achieved.
- Design and participate in internal training that will improve service levels as required.
Review
- Produce performance reports, service reviews, improvement plans and other ad-hoc reports as required.
- Assist and/or lead internal root cause analysis sessions for customer specific major incidents.
- Ensure reports and information provided to management and customers is fully up to date and accurate.
- Track and manage the customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle and in line with agreed timescales; e.g. time to provide a quote, delivering a service, repairing a failure, ensuring accurate invoicing/cash collection and cessation of services.
- Take the lead in service reviews, representing our success to customers and proactive action plans for any areas of customer concern. Chair meetings when required.
Person Profile
- Education & Qualifications: Specialised/Technical
- Bachelors degree or equivalent, or substantial alternative experience
- ITIL Foundation certification
- Further ITIL certifications
- PRINCE2 or other Project Management certification
Experience
- Good experience in a similar customer facing role in Service, Delivery or Client Relationship Management, typically of at least two years.
- IT / Telecoms industry experience
- Experience with the software development lifecycle, cloud platforms and/or the development of hardware and software
- Experience working with or for the Contact Centre industry
- Experience in project management or project delivery in the IT and Telecoms sector
- Experience in conducting Service Review Meetings with customers and providers
- Good experience of producing accurate reports, and of providing meaningful analysis on trends and patterns from raw data.
- Experience in influencing supplier companies to make appropriate changes to support customer requirements and continual improvement.
Skills / Aptitude:
- Commercial acumen: able to consider both the customer and company, setting expectations with both accordingly
- Strong interpersonal skills including negotiation and influencing
- Excellent customer service
- Strong written and verbal communication
- Good numeracy
- Able to remain calm and professional under pressure
- Strong organisational skills
- Good MS Office skills including Word / Excel with and ability to design, update and issue accurate reports
- Able to clearly instruct and effectively mentor / train others
The nature of a service management role will mean the jobholder will experience peaks in workload around customer requests / incidents and so must be flexible to accommodate this and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction. There will also be a requirement to visit customer locations, so an ability to do so will be essential.
Job Summary
Job Reference:
SMM
Closing Date:
2024-10-06
