Head of Customer Operations

Want to help us build the world’s best childcare service?

This a strategic, commercial role owning the experience families have from the moment they’ve hired a nanny. It is not a customer support role.

Salary: £70-£80k (depending on experience) + EMI share options.

Hours: Full-time, with flexible and/or part-time working arrangements available.

Location: Hybrid. We have an office in Farringdon/Clerkenwell. You can work from there every day if you like, or remote/hybrid. Whichever you choose, you will need to come to London at least once a month for team days.

Watch Rachel and Kellie talk more informally about the role

They talk about why we’re hiring, what this new role will do, what our team is like, and what we’re looking for.

About Koru Kids

At Koru Kids we have a triple mission: to support working parents during the hardest years of their life, to give children the best possible childhood to allow them to flourish as adults, and to create really great jobs for childcarers. We’re a marketplace, which means we have two customers: families and childcarers.

Our business is growing fast and we’ve delivered over 4.5m hours of childcare. We’re backed by strong investors and top-class VCs. Our culture is informal, hard-working and kind. The team is an A++ when it comes to talent and our “no dickheads” rule means we’re also a humble and supportive bunch. We’re really committed to working with integrity, doing the right thing and building a company we are truly proud of.

We take great care with who we hire and all team members are superbly talented and really nice. If you’re brilliant AND humble, you’ll fit right in.

What's it all about?

We’re really proud of the service we offer our customers, and we’re looking for an experienced operations leader to own everything that happens once a family has found and hired a nanny. Reporting directly to the Nanny Service General Manager (GM), in this new role you’ll lead our Customer Support, Payroll & Product Finance and Success & Retention teams, and be the person who decides how the post match service should work.

Your job comes down to one thing: keep families with us for longer by providing them with a market leading service. We measure that in hours of childcare used over time.

Families pay us to take away the complexity of finding, employing and managing a nanny. Our promise is that we handle the hard parts so parents don’t have to, and it’s why they choose us over hiring directly or using a cheaper alternative. Unlike most traditional nanny agencies, we don’t charge a large upfront fee. We charge a service fee for every hour worked, so we only succeed if families stay happy with us over time.
Keeping that promise every time is harder than it sounds. Every time a parent has to chase an update, correct an invoice or sort out a scheduling problem themselves, it chips away at the trust families place in us.

You’ll remove those frustrations by building a system and teams that:

• Deliver the everyday service brilliantly, from onboarding and support to paying nannies accurately and on time




• Proactively engage with families and nannies to understand and mitigate challenges early




• Drive continuous improvement, improve efficiency and consider systemic changes to improve experience and reduce friction

You’ll work closely with Product Engineering, CRM and Sales to deliver improvements for customers. Building relationships and influencing across teams will be an important part of this role (but don’t worry, we’re all really nice and dedicated to giving our customers the best possible service!)

Objectives for this role

1. Reduce family churn and increase how long families stay with us

You’ll own the ‘post match proposition’ and keep making it better. Working closely with the General Manager, you’ll set the strategy for this part of the business and be the expert on the service we offer matched families.

This could include:

• Finding the structural reasons matches end early and driving fixes (onboarding, communications, pricing, nanny training) that stop them happening again




• Making sure every match is onboarded well
  Supporting families when their care needs change or a match ends, including rematching them quickly and well




• Setting up the Success & Retention function: defining its remit and shape, hiring the team and building processes so we support families proactively at key points in the lifecycle of a match




• Working out which signals show a match is in trouble, so we can step in before it’s too late




• Using data and customer feedback to keep improving our customer value proposition




• Designing performance reporting, including leading and lagging indicators, that tells us how healthy matches are




• Speaking to customers regularly, so you’re the expert on families at this stage of the journey

2. Deliver an outstanding customer experience

• Coaching the Customer Support team to move away from transactional responses to considering the broader customer situation




• Launching CSAT (or an equivalent measure), so we have a clear, ongoing view of how well support is working




• Removing the friction families and nannies feel when they contact us, like being asked for information we already have or having to chase for an answer




• Reducing how often families and nannies need to contact us for routine things, cutting repeat contacts and giving the right answer first time




• Working with the CRM team on post match communications, so every message improves the customer experience

3. Run core functions that can scale

• Supporting our Payroll & Product Finance Manager to run payroll accurately and on time for every family, and replacing manual processes that won’t hold up as we grow




• Making sure families and nannies get clear, reliable employment support, from setting up payroll to understanding pay, holiday and tax




• Using AI and automation to cut manual work across support and payroll, so the team spends its time supporting families instead of on repetitive tasks




• Making sure the teams have the processes, capacity and reporting they need to handle growth without the service slipping

4. Develop strong managers

• Coaching and supporting the Customer Support, Payroll & Product Finance and Success & Retention managers so they grow their capability and actively improve performance, service and results in their area.

A typical day

9am – Company-wide standup to hear what’s happening across the business. You check your dashboards and spot that the number of matches with no shifts logged in the last fortnight has crept up.

9.30am – 1:1 with Sultana, our Payroll & Product Finance Manager. You work through why a handful of families were invoiced late last month and agree which manual step to automate first.

10.30am – Focus time! We’ve received a lot of feedback about nannies’ cooking skills recently. You realise this must be important for families so you want to spend some time thinking not just about how to improve it, but whether we can go above and beyond to make this a really core part of our proposition.

12pm – Weekly call with the product team to talk through the new post match app they are developing. You review designs for shift submission together and give them a few ideas to improve the user experience.

1pm – Lunch. You grab some food and go for a walk to get some fresh air

2pm – You’re working with the Success & Retention team on a proactive outreach process for families who haven’t logged a shift in two weeks. You draft the copy yourself, then use Claude to check it against our tone of voice.

3.30pm – You have a research call booked in with a family (you speak to families every week so you’re constantly hearing real life feedback). They have lots to say about our invoicing process, so you make a note to take it to payroll and product.

4.30pm – Weekly catch up with Mando, our Customer Support Manager, starting with a quick check in about her recent holiday! But you also find time to review CSAT results together and talk through how she’s coaching the team on more complex queries.

5.30pm – You wrap up the day by asking Claude to check your meeting transcripts from the day and pull out any actions.

About you

You’re the kind of person that has a hunger to fix things; bad service drives you crazy and you find it hard to ignore something if it could be done better.

You’ll be great at this job if:

• You can take a messy or missing process and turn it into something clean, defined and repeatable




• You love working with data and are comfortable in a spreadsheet, digging into numbers to find out what’s really going on




• You’ve led teams and developed managers, including through change, keeping people on board and the service running well while things are changing




• You’re strategic and practical. You can say where this part of the business should be in a year and work back to what happens first, and you’d rather build something and ship it than write a slide about it




• You’re excited about AI, you keep up with what’s newly possible and you’ll raise how well the whole team uses it




• You can get to grips with operational finance work like payroll quickly, but you don’t need to be an expert in this area




• You notice when things could work better and you’re happy to get stuck in and fix them




• You’ve owned big problems and have a track record of delivering results, with clear outcomes for customers and the business




• You judge a process by how it feels for the customer, and you’re just as happy on the phone as you are in a spreadsheet; you’ll need to speak to families from day one




• You’re curious and always start with the problem. You want to know whether something needs to be done a certain way or has just always been done that way!




• You’re comfortable with ambiguity, pace and change, and energised by building something new
  You’re always learning, and you’re comfortable being wrong and saying so




• Have marketplace experience




• Up to £7k towards a Koru Kids nanny each year




• Health and wellbeing benefits




• Cycle to work and electric car salary sacrifice schemes




• Deals and discounts with over 30,000 brands




• 15 minute initial conversation with Kellie (General Manager)




• Live task with the team




• Case study and final interview




• References

Diversity & Inclusion

We embrace diversity and equality in a serious way. We are committed to building a team with a variety of backgrounds, skills and views. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. Creating a culture of Equality isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also the smart thing. Details are here and for a TON more info about our company culture in general, check out our careers page .

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