Customer Improvement and Innovation Lead in Newcastle upon Tyne

The Customer Improvement and Innovation Lead is a Grade 7 role within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) Improving Customer Delivery team. You will lead high‐impact work to improve how millions of customers experience Defra services, shaping and delivering practical improvements across complex, cross‐organisational journeys. Defra handles over 21 million transactions a year, with customer journeys that often span multiple agencies and touchpoints. These journeys can be long, fragmented and difficult to navigate, requiring leaders who can work across organisational boundaries to drive meaningful improvement.

The role sits within the Change Directorate, a new Directorate helping Defra deliver change sustainably and at pace. Working across the Defra group, we bring together customer thinking, project delivery and change management to shape and deliver change that matters. We help the organisation prioritise what matters most, manage change impacts, and ensure improvements are delivered effectively, with customers and their needs at the heart of decision making.

Defra is the UK government department responsible for safeguarding our natural environment, supporting our world‐leading food and farming industry, and sustaining a thriving rural economy. Our broad remit means we play a major role in peoples' day‐to‐day lives – from the food we eat and the air we breathe to the water we drink.

• Leading customer pathfinder activity from problem definition through to delivery, working in partnership with multidisciplinary teams to redesign services and test innovative approaches.
• Blending improvement approaches, including continuous improvement, lean and user‐centred design, to suit the needs of different services and contexts.
• Acting as the voice of the customer, ensuring that customer needs and impacts are central to service design, improvement planning, and implementation.
• Leading and working as part of multidisciplinary teams across the Defra group to identify customer problems, shape service improvement priorities, and deliver tangible improvements to customer experience.
• Building and maintaining strong networks across Defra and its delivery bodies to embed a customer‐focused culture and ensure collaboration on shared challenges and opportunities.
• Working with customer delivery teams across the group to improve the consistency, effectiveness, and quality of customer journeys.
• Managing a small, high‐performing team responsible for delivering improvements in customer experience across Defra organisations.
• Supporting crisis response and service resilience, including developing and improving reactive customer communication and service delivery options.
• Promoting and embedding customer delivery best practice across Defra and wider government, building the department's reputation as a leader in customer‐focused service design.
• Playing an active role in the leadership team of the Improving Customer Delivery function helping to set direction, drive strategy, and deliver high‐impact outcomes.

We’re expanding into new, ambitious areas of work – and in this senior leadership role, you’ll be at the forefront of setting the direction, driving delivery, and ensuring we achieve meaningful results. We’ll expect you to provide strategic oversight, secure buy‐in from senior stakeholders, and ensure initiatives deliver both for customers and the organisation.

• Championing the adoption of emerging technologies – leading on how we explore and implement innovative tools, including AI, to strengthen customer insight, improve service efficiency, and enhance digital interactions across Defra.
• Driving the rapid improvement pathfinder programme – overseeing the delivery of end‐to‐end service improvement projects that bring together multidisciplinary teams, blend different improvement methodologies, and deliver measurable impact for customers while improving internal efficiency and effectiveness.
• Developing evidence‐led, innovative ways to understand service performance and customer experience – including pinpointing real pain points, addressing them in a transformational way, defining success measures, and tracking whether improvements deliver the required outcomes.
• Creating a new approach to improvement – we’re also creating an adaptable improvement approach that blends the most effective elements from techniques such as continuous improvement, lean, user‐centred design, and user research, allowing us to tailor solutions to the unique challenges of each service in a way that meets customer needs.
• Strengthening customer contact to enable first‐time resolution – leading work to ensure customers can achieve their outcomes first time by improving how they interact with Defra services. This includes simplifying processes, reducing avoidable contact, enhancing the quality and consistency of customer delivery, and driving business efficiencies and better ways of working across teams.

This is your opportunity to shape the future of customer experience across a major government department, ensuring that Defra's services, culture, and communications reflect the needs of the people and organisations we serve – both now and in the future.