Customer Service Team Lead in Manchester

About Jaja

Our Mission: Empowering our customers to buy, borrow, and build—driven by tech, fuelled by data, and built for the future.

Our Company Values: Care Deeply, Adapt & Thrive, Challenge everything, Go for it! Own it, Make it Simple.

Jaja is an innovative UK based consumer finance business, leading initially with a digital credit card launched in 2018, and a pipeline of consumer finance solutions in the making. We are on a mission to redefine the consumer finance experience and liberate customers from needless complexity, wasted time and frustration. Or as we say it, Make Simple.

We will delight our customers – making the customer experience simpler, more enjoyable, more intelligent – treating customers fairly and giving them more control of their money.

Why Join Us? This is a chance to make a real impact in a growing business on a mission to change the face of the consumer finance industry forever. We have a collaborative team structure fueled by an exciting mix of people, welcoming experienced people from the industry with both feet on the ground and tech-savvy dreamers who pave way for the new stuff. Come as you are and be yourself!

This is a performance leadership role operating within a regulated financial services environment. You will own the outputs of your team - but at JAJA Finance, performance means more than hitting numbers. It means delivering consistently good outcomes for customers, treating every person who contacts us fairly, and upholding the standards the FCA expects under Consumer Duty.

You will lead a team of agents across a multi-channel contact centre, holding accountability for operational KPIs while ensuring that how your team achieves those results is as important as the results themselves. This role requires a leader who understands that efficiency and customer fairness are not in tension - they go hand in hand.

• Clear performance standards, communicated with confidence and consistency.
• Good customer outcomes delivered fairly, identifying vulnerability in the moment and responding accordingly.
• Identifying complaints and escalating appropriately.
• Coaching that is structured, evidence-based, and genuinely developmental.
• A team that performs because they understand what good looks like - not just what the targets are.

Key Responsibilities

• Set clear, non-negotiable performance expectations and KPI targets aligned with team and business goals - and communicate them with confidence.
• Monitor team performance daily using real-time data and dashboards, tracking QA scores, hold time, ACW, schedule adherence, and customer sentiment.
• Deliver structured, frequent coaching - in the moment and in scheduled 1:1s - using evidence-based frameworks such as SBI.
• Conduct regular performance reviews with clear RAG status, written actions, and defined timelines for improvement.
• Recognise and reward high performance consistently; address underperformance directly, constructively, and without delay.
• Lead daily and weekly performance huddles that drive focus, accountability, and awareness of what good customer outcomes look like.

• JAJA Finance is committed to meeting its obligations under the FCA’s Consumer Duty, and this role sits at the heart of how we deliver that in practice. You will be expected to embed Consumer Duty thinking into how your team operates every day - not as a compliance exercise, but as a genuine standard of conduct.
• Ensure your team consistently delivers good outcomes for customers across all four Consumer Duty outcomes: products and services, price and value, consumer understanding, and consumer support.
• Monitor QA outputs for Consumer Duty indicators, including whether customers are receiving clear, fair, and not misleading information.
• Identify and escalate systemic issues that may indicate customers are not receiving the outcomes they should - including patterns in demand drivers, repeat contacts, and dissatisfaction.
• Ensure that agents understand their regulatory responsibilities and can articulate what good customer outcomes look like in their daily interactions.
• Support regular review of team-level Consumer Duty metrics, contributing to the broader management information used to evidence compliance.

• We serve a broad customer base, and some of those customers will be in vulnerable circumstances. Your team will be on the front line of identifying and responding to vulnerability appropriately.
• Ensure all agents are trained and confident in recognising indicators of vulnerability, including non-obvious or temporary vulnerability.
• Coach agents to adapt their approach in real time when vulnerability is identified - adjusting tone, pace, and the support offered.
• Monitor interactions for instances where vulnerability may not have been identified or handled appropriately, and use these as coaching opportunities.
• Champion a team culture where asking for help with a difficult or sensitive interaction is encouraged, not stigmatised.

• Complaints are an important signal - both for individual customer outcomes and for the health of the operation. You will play a central role in ensuring that complaints are handled with the seriousness and care they require.
• Oversee the quality of first-contact complaint handling within your team, ensuring agents respond with empathy, ownership, and clarity.
• Ensure complaints are correctly identified, recorded, and escalated in line with FCA timescales and internal process.
• Analyse complaint trends at team level, identifying root causes and working with relevant teams to address them at source.
• Use complaints data as a coaching input - reviewing how individual complaints were handled and identifying what should have happened differently.
• Contribute to broader complaints MI and ensure your team’s complaint volumes, themes, and outcomes are understood and acted upon.

• Partner with QA to review quality trends, identify systemic gaps, and implement targeted coaching plans.
• Ensure agents understand not just whether they passed a QA check, but why the standard exists and what good looks like in practice.
• Drive first-contact resolution and reduce avoidable repeat contact through proactive coaching and process improvement.
• Maintain accurate records of performance conversations, coaching outcomes, and any formal improvement plans.

• Build a team culture of accountability, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.
• Identify development needs early and create structured development plans that build capability in both performance and regulatory competence.
• Proactively manage absence, wellbeing, and engagement, escalating concerns appropriately and sensitively.

You will be accountable for the following metrics across your team. These are not background indicators - they are the measures by which your team’s performance will be assessed. Alongside these quantitative measures, you will also be expected to evidence good customer outcomes and regulatory compliance through QA frameworks and Consumer Duty reporting.

About You

You set standards and hold the line. You use data every day, not just in monthly reviews. You coach in the moment - not just when a session is scheduled. You understand that in a regulated environment, how your team treats customers is as important as how efficiently they do it. You’re comfortable having direct performance conversations and you follow through. You know the difference between a team that’s busy and a team that’s performing. You are always thinking and planning ahead to ensure your team is set up to succeed.

• Proven track record leading high-performing customer servicing teams in a regulated financial services or fintech environment.
• Demonstrable understanding of Consumer Duty and the FCA’s expectations around good customer outcomes - and how to embed these in day-to-day team leadership.
• Experience identifying and managing vulnerable customer interactions, including coaching agents to respond appropriately and consistently.
• Strong working knowledge of contact centre KPIs including QA, hold time, ACW, schedule adherence, and abandonment rate and SLA’s - and how to move them.
• Skilled in performance coaching using structured frameworks with demonstrable improvement outcomes.
• Experienced in multi-channel servicing - voice and messaging - with the ability to coach effectively across both.
• Comfortable analysing performance data and translating insight into targeted action.
• Resilient and direct: able to manage change, maintain standards under pressure, and lead through ambiguity.
• Excellent communication skills - clear, consistent, and credible with agents, peers, and senior stakeholders.

• Zendesk experience or knowledge (full platform training provided for the right candidate).
• Experience contributing to Consumer Duty MI, reporting, or evidence frameworks.
• Familiarity with continuous improvement methodologies such as Lean or Six Sigma.
• Mental health first aid qualification or formal wellbeing training.
• Experience with workforce management platforms and scheduling tools.

What's in it for you?

• The chance to make a real impact in a growing business on a mission to change the face of the consumer finance industry forever.
• Competitive salary.
• Pension contributions, including Salary Exchange facility.
• Annual bonus potential.
• Private medical cover provided by Vitality (optional benefit).
• 25 days annual leave (FTE) plus UK bank holidays (with an additional day added for each full calendar year worked, up to a maximum of 30 days).
• Your birthday off each year as an additional day's holiday.
• 4x life insurance cover.
• Access to our confidential Employee assistance programme.