Customer Support Associate (Specialist Support Team) in Newcastle

We’re excited to offer a rewarding opportunity to join our Specialist Support Team—a group dedicated to helping customers with complex needs, such as serious mental health challenges or multiple vulnerabilities, who may struggle to manage their everyday banking. In this role, you’ll provide compassionate, tailored support through both telephony and back-office channels. You’ll work closely with internal teams across our stores and contact centres, as well as external partners including third-party charities, to ensure our customers receive the care and assistance they need.

At Nationwide, we offer hybrid working wherever possible. More rewarding relationships are supported through our hybrid approach, bringing colleagues together across our UK-wide estate, whilst also supporting generous access to home working. We value our time in the office to solve problems, to learn, and to feel connected. For this job, you'll be located at our nearest regional hub. There will be a need to regularly connect with colleagues for collaboration events in one of our sites. This is anticipated to be monthly in Glasgow or Gosforth.

If your application is successful, your hiring manager will provide further details on how this works. You’ll be employed by Nationwide from day one, delivering real impact and benefitting from a highly competitive range of benefits. We’re a workplace where you’re rewarded, recognised and celebrated. If we receive a high volume of relevant applications, we may close the advert earlier than the advertised date, so please apply as soon as you can.

As a Customer Service Associate within the Specialist Support Team you will be working with our most vulnerable customers, to understand and respond to their needs, identifying the right support and solutions tailored to their individual circumstances. You will recognise when a situation requires specialist input and confidently refer customers to the most appropriate resources. Answering inbound calls, you will need to be empathetic and resilient dealing with emotive complex situations. You will collaborate with colleagues and external third parties such as solicitors and debt charities to ensure customers receive comprehensive support. You will share your knowledge and best practice with the wider team to foster a supportive and collaborative environment, and build strong working relationships across the team and wider bank to ensure a seamless and compassionate customer experience.

You will have:

• Experience supporting vulnerable customers with empathy and care, asking the right questions and offering meaningful assistance
• Strong communication and listening skills, with the ability to understand and respond to individual customer situations
• Telephony experience and a track record of engaging with customers by phone, managing complex, sensitive queries
• Previous experience working on administrative tasks having a keen eye for detail
• Strong organisational skills and the ability to stay motivated and manage your own workload effectively

Our customer first behaviours put customers and members at the heart of how we work together. They are the set of behaviours that every colleague needs to display, in every role:

• Feel what customers feel - We step into our customers’ shoes, using their feedback and insights to empathise with them and to understand their needs, so that every decision we make starts and finishes with our customers in mind
• Say it straight - We are brave in speaking out and saying what we think – we’re honest and direct with good intent, openly sharing diverse perspectives to reach the best conclusions and using language everyone can understand
• Push for better - We don’t settle for mediocrity, we challenge the status quo, taking responsibility for continuous improvement and personal development
• Get it done - We prioritise what will have the greatest impact, we are decisive, and we take accountability for delivering brilliant customer outcomes

You can strengthen your application by showing how our customer first behaviours resonate with you, and where you may have already demonstrated these.

The extras you’ll get:

• 25 days holiday, pro rata
• Access to private medical insurance
• A highly competitive pension to help you build a strong foundation for retirement
• Access to an annual performance-related bonus
• Training and development to help you progress your career
• A great selection of additional benefits through our salary sacrifice scheme
• Life assurance to provide peace of mind for you and your loved ones in the event of your death
• Wellhub – access to a range of free and paid options for health and wellness
• Up to 2 days of paid volunteering a year

If this role is for you, please click the ‘Apply Now’ button. You’ll need to attach your up-to-date CV and answer a few quick questions for us. Once we’ve received your application successfully, we will invite you to the first stage; our online assessments! Within a few hours you’ll receive a link to your unique candidate hub – here we’ll ask you to complete some online assessments within 48 hours of applying; these include a situational judgement test, checking and numerical assessments – all focussed around what’s important to us in a member facing role at Nationwide. We respond to everyone, so we will be in contact shortly after the closing date to let you know the outcome of your application.