View Vacancy - CPK - Customer Experience Hub Global Strategy and Implementation Lead, D6(L)

To manage the international arm of the United Kingdom Visas and Immigration (UKVI) Customer Experience Hub. This will involve:

• Embedding the UKVI channel strategy and customer experience hub principles into the international operations of UKVI by ensuring customer account managers across the globe provide a consistent stream of performance data and customer / stakeholder insight to feed into the hub.
• Building and maintaining close relationships with colleagues across the global visa network, other government departments, commercial suppliers as well as UKVI colleagues in the UK, ensuring they have opportunity to submit views about the services offered and ideas for improvements, whilst managing expectations.
• Driving improvements to customer products and services by making proposals to the Visas and Citizenship Executive Board. These proposals will be based on insight gathered and will be developed in conjunction with the Customer Insight team, the Customer Experience Hub lead and other UKVI colleagues.
• Potential management of customer account managers (CAMs) to deliver improvement ideas / projects, both in China and across global locations.

The Customer Experience Hub is a new, developing function that sits within the Citizenship and Visas Directorate and at the heart of UKVI.

The purpose of the Customer Experience Hub is to:

• Bring together all the information – qualitative and quantitative - that UKVI holds relating to customer experience (insight, research, performance, stakeholder feedback, issues) in a single place, collecting it in a consistent way on a regular basis
• Provide a single place where people can escalate problems through to and then see outputs
• Analyze the information to look for trends (good and bad) that will help us to create both short term tactical and long term strategic improvements to products, services, processes and policies in order to enhance the overall customer experience
• Work with UKVI colleagues, other government departments, commercial partners and other external stakeholder colleagues in order to deliver these enhancements (getting sign off on proposals from UKVIs World Class Customer Service Board)
• Drive a positive culture change in UKVI relating to our attitude towards customers

This is a new team and a developing function and therefore the role will involve helping the hub lead to set up and establish the team, the hub and its function within the business. This is an opportunity to get in at the start and help the hub lead to shape the direction of the team. Key responsibilities will include (but are not limited to):

• Driving a positive, customer centric culture change across the global visa network. This role will require the ability to bring global customer account managers and operational colleagues on board with the customer experience hub concept, encouraging them to actively seek feedback from customers, stakeholders and partners and feed this into the central hub. Persuading and influencing others to bring fresh, innovative ideas to the hub and explaining to them the benefits of doing so will be key to the role.
• Alignment of customer improvement proposals with wider UKVI and BICS strategies.  It is important that improvement proposals put forward to the executive board are not done so in isolation. The post holder will need to have / develop a wider understanding of departmental strategy to ensure that not only do proposals consider customer needs but also follow the wider strategic direction of the business. Where customer insight suggests customers want or need something that doesn’t align with the wider strategic approach, consideration will need to be given as to whether to make a case to the board to implement a change (or even alter the businesses strategic direction).
• A close working relationship with the digital development lead. The hub digital development lead is also based in China and these roles should complement each other, with this role working with the digital lead to consider what technological improvement opportunities are available now and what might be available in the future. This is about more than just looking at internal capabilities; it will involve a degree of horizon scanning and building an understanding of how global customers interact with other large organisations and consideration of what might work for visa customers, as well as what they might expect from us.
• An ability to work autonomously and use initiative will be very important in this role. The overall hub lead is UK based (in London), with other team members potentially based in different parts of the UK and stakeholders at locations around the world. This means strong self-management and time management is required to be effective.
• Directly oversee delivery of business development activity in Asia Pacific. Manage the business development team, delivering initiatives identified by the hub to improve customer experience and progress bespoke partnerships for key and new customer accounts.
• Work closely with strategic communications to align input and output from the customer experience hub, amplify and support the work of the business development team and direct communications to address insight.
• Identify new products, services and communications interventions, based on insight identified within the hub. Direct the SEO’s product development expertise to areas that will add most value to UKVI, and help to overcome barriers in development; oversee implementation where necessary.

• Strong stakeholder engagement experience with a focus on improvement of services for customers
• Expertise in the use of complex methodologies to develop insight and research to deliver an improved customer experience