Cedar is currently collaborating with a local authority in the South East to recruit a Head of Customer Experience and Operations to join their team and be accountable for leading and managing specific Council services at a tactical delivery level.

Daily Rate: £350 - £450 per day (Inside IR35)

Working pattern: 2-3 days in the office per week

Responsibilities:

• Ensure the efficient operation and control of the Customer Services operation, including face-to-face services.
• Directly manage up to 5 direct line reports with overall responsibility for a flexible and dynamic pool of around 50 FTE and relevant establishment budget.
• Work with the Customer Service Transformation Programme, and other programmes, to ensure the customer offer delivers business case objectives.
• Lead the development of the customer services strategy, including the digital offering and the implementation of channel shift strategy and plans.
• Act as business owner of resident and business facing Council website and web-based Information, Advice and Guidance tools, portals and digital platform working on its strategy development and continual improvement.
• Champion change in the customer services environment to deliver more online services and work with internal IT and external partners to continuously maximise the Council's Digital strategy.
• Contribute to Technical User Groups to ensure Services have a valuable input to the future technologies, solutions, designs, and upgrades.
• Support and deputise for the Assistant Director including representing the authority at internal and external meetings.
• Overall responsibility for the service in terms of training, performance management, quality, and cross-cutting elements (such as Health & Safety and Business Continuity).
• Overall responsibility for the service in terms of quality monitoring and continuous improvement though real time analytics, cross channel insight and analytics.

Knowledge and Experience:

• Previous experience working in a local authority or similar large complex public sector organisation.
• Experience of digital transformation projects is essential.
• Great people performance and budget management skills.
• Ability to work with high level internal and external stakeholders.
• Proven experience managing complex service delivery within a challenging and political environment.
• Ability to exercise initiative and good judgement in delivering service and Council aims and objectives.
• Experience of delivering high visibility leadership and culture change, for large teams of staff in a busy environment.
• Knowledge of benchmarking service provision for improvement purposes.
• Experience of delivering and implementing continuous improvement initiatives with customer satisfaction as the key driver.
• Ability to set, use and share performance data to drive improvement at a service wide level.