Payroll Experience Manager in Reading

Ciphr has an exciting opportunity for a Payroll Experience Manager to join the team and work with our award-winning payroll software.

As a Payroll Experience Manager, you’ll be responsible for improving the customer experience during the end-to-end lifecycle of a bureau customer. Your goal will be to ensure customers have a positive experience from their first interaction with the bureau during implementation through to moving to BAU and eventual offboarding. You’ll build positive and proactive relationships with our customers, placing the voice of the customer at the forefront of everything we do. You’ll also be responsible for supporting and developing the payroll administrators to become payroll experts and deliver a gold standard customer experience.

Location
This is a remote first role, you will average 2 days a month with the team in our Reading office.

What you’ll be doing

• Build trusted customer relationships, addressing needs and challenges.
• Promote and drive cross-functional collaboration to streamline processes and enhance the customer experience.
• Focus on increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy in turn reducing customer churn.
• Model our values, brand and tone of voice to support a gold-standard customer experience and encourage the wider bureau team to embed these at all customer touch points.
• Contribute to building a customer centric culture across the bureau.
• Create and manage a positive onboarding experience for new starters.
• Continuously assess the wellbeing of your team, ensuring they get support when needed, and ensure that holiday and sickness cover does not cause stress on other members of the bureau.
• Coach and mentor payroll administrators to develop stronger technical skills and industry expertise.
• Provide regular 1-1s, performance feedback and development plans for each administrator identifying training needs within your direct team and the wider bureau team.
• Encourage administrators to take ownership of customer queries and develop problem-solving skills.
• Foster a collaborative team environment focused on learning, accountability and service excellence.
• Get to know all the payrolls you are accountable for in your team, ensuring that in an emergency you would be able to cover the production of the payroll.
• Carry out the parallel runs for new payrolls coming into your team, producing payroll procedures manuals and training your administrator.
• Carry out account reviews with each of the customers in your team owning the feedback and delivery of any changes required.
• Stay updated on payroll legislation and industry changes, sharing knowledge across the team.
• Run monthly statistics reports checking the accuracy of each of the payrolls in your team. Identifying any problems and analysing the root cause of any errors highlighted to work with the administrator and/or the customer to prevent the error happening again.
• Work with your leadership team on major incidents or P1s to work through to resolution. Identify measures we can put in place to mitigate future risks.

What good looks like

• All customers will have regular account reviews as defined on a tier basis.
• Customer meetings will be attended including on site meetings where appropriate.
• Service quality and customer experience is regularly tracked through measures such as NPS and retention.
• Feedback from account reviews is proactively reviewed, lessons learned are provided to the organization, opportunities to improve internal processes to increase accuracy or efficiency are identified, and it is ensured that the team works to one standard.
• Back-to-green plans are created and owned, communication with the customer and internal stakeholders is maintained throughout.
• Full root cause analysis is carried out following issues or incidents, and the results are shared with customers and the wider bureau.
• A gold standard procedure manual is provided for all customers, and consistent use by all administrators is ensured, with administrators in the team trained to provide 3x coverage across all payrolls.
• Bureau generated errors are kept below 2%.
• Personalised goals are created with each administrator to elevate the capabilities of the bureau.
• The bureau is embedded into the wider company, and silos are broken down. Strong, dependable relationships are fostered with peers across the business, particularly in account management, sales, customer experience, professional services, and support.
• Daily operational responsibilities are transitioned away from by delegating and training, allowing focus to shift to the more strategic aspects of the role.

What you’ll need to succeed

• Evidence of deploying a customer focus approach with the ability to amplify the voice of the customer within the business.
• Ability to resolve issues effectively, handle difficult conversations constructively, and remove obstacles for customers.
• Organisational skills to effectively prioritise multiple customer requests and communicate regular updates to the business and customer.
• Dedicated to delivering outstanding customer experience, willing to go the extra mile.
• Ability to motivate others and thrive in the chaos of transformation.
• A strong aptitude for fostering cross functional collaborative relationships.
• Demonstrate the ability to combine strong technical knowledge with effective people management capabilities to coach, mentor and develop team members’ industry skills.
• Skilled at recognising process gaps and driving meaningful improvements.
• Identify trends in data and translate into actionable insights.
• Consistently role model organisational values and expected behaviours to inspire high standards across the team.

How you’ll contribute to our team

• You’ll attend the office as and when required with the expectation being at least twice per month.
• You’ll deliver change to enable us to become a customer-first bureau.
• You’ll provide the team with lessons learned to inform continual improvement amongst the bureau.
• You’ll build collaborative, cross-functional relationships with other departments to support an experience that reflects the voice of the customer.
• You’ll build proactive, credible, and trusted relationships with our customers, acting as an ambassador for the business, both internally and externally.
• You’ll implement initiatives to streamline processes and reduce errors.
• You’ll work with the people team on recruitment, development and retention of bureau staff.
• With an organised approach, you’ll lead your team to customer service excellence, ensuring error rates are minimal and customer satisfaction is high.
• You’ll build resilience within the bureau by driving process standardisation and implementing 3x coverage across all payrolls.

What we offer you

• 30 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Family National Trust Membership.
• Birthday day off.
• Family forming support - e.g., time off for family forming appointments or to support your partner.
• Enhanced maternity and paternity leave.
• Work from Anywhere for 4 weeks per year.
• Volunteering days for 2 days per year.
• Cycle to work scheme.
• Pension.
• Health cash plan.
• Life assurance.
• Technology/home improvements.
• Loans.
• Perks at Work - access to exclusive discounts, cinema tickets, etc.
• Regular training.
• £1,500 employee referral scheme.
• Medical Cover and Dental cover (after 6 months’ service).
• Income Protection insurance (after 12 months’ service).