Head of Customer Experience

The vacancy

Are you a highly driven customer service professional, who places the customer voice and experience at the heart of what you do?

If so, our Head of Customer Experience role could be the perfect job for you

Longhurst Group is a leading housing Group across the Midlands & East of England, committed to enhancing communities and improving the lives of both our colleagues and customers.

With a mission to provide quality, safe, affordable housing that build great foundations for our customers, our Customer Services & Complaints teams are critical to ensuring our customers receive a world class service at the first point of contact, and can resolve any dissatisfactions efficiently.

As the Head of Customer Experience, you will hold responsibility for developing an engagement offer that ensures the voice of the customer is heard across the Group, alongside being responsible for the holistic customer journey at the point of entry into the Group through our access channels.

Further key responsibilities are listed below :

• Work with the Director of Housing and Customer Services to drive a customer first, performance focused culture across the Group.
• Provide clear and direct leadership to the Customer Services, Customer Engagement and Complaints teams to ensure high performance, and identify strategies to deliver continuous improvement.
• Empower the Customer Services Team to take full ownership to resolve as many expressions of dissatisfaction at first point of contact, preventing service failures escalating to a formal complaint.
• Ensure that there’s an effective compliments and complaints management process in place for the Group, in line and fully compliant with the Housing Ombudsman Complaints Handling Code.

To be successful in application for our Head of Customer Experience role, you will have proven experience in delivering high quality, customer-focused services, alongside knowledge and understanding of the regulatory environment within social housing and the implementation of co-regulatory approaches.

Our Head of Customer Experience role operates in a hybrid capacity, contracted to 36.25 hours per week. To us, this means a minimum of 3 days p / week spent across our Rushden, Peterborough and Boston offices for collaboration with colleagues across the Group, with the remainder of the week working from home (subject to business needs - we are open to discussion around how this is built into working weeks.

A large portion of our Customer Services and Complaints Team are based in our Rushden and Boston offices.

Please note that initial 1st stage conversations will take place on Thursday 12th October via Microsoft Teams, and 2nd stage interviews will take place on Friday 18th October, at a location TBC.

What you receive from us

• A competitive 31-day annual leave entitlement plus bank holidays
• Car Allowance £3, per annum plus 3% of salary (non-contractual, annually reviewed)
• Pension Scheme with contributions matched by us up to 8.5%
• Life Cover of three times your annual salary (as part of pension scheme membership)
• Membership of our Health Care Cash Plan including Employee Assistance programme and DoctorLine
• Access to a range of discounts, including Blue Light and B&Q Tradepoint Cards
• Free access to financial education service, supporting with personalised financial information on a range of topics such as mortgages, retirement planning, pensions, saving and investments, insurance and will writing
• Free Eye Tests
• Free flu vaccinations
• Investment in your personal development through our extensive learning and development opportunities.
• Professional subscription for membership fees relating to your role, paid for by us
• Family friendly, carers leave plus other paid leave
• Long Service Awards
• Carers Networking Group and resources to support Unpaid Carers

This role currently attracts a non-contractual car allowance according to our Driving at Work Policy. This is currently set at £3, per annum, however eligibility for the allowance and the rate of the allowance is reviewed annually and any changes will be notified to you.