Customer Support Manager in Fareham

The ONS operates a flexible hybrid working model across the UK, with colleagues linked to one of our contractual locations working between office and remote throughout the week. The locations for this role are Newport, Titchfield (Fareham). All colleagues are required to work from their contractually allocated site for at least 40% of their working time. The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.

Do you have excellent communication and organisational skills? Have you got a good eye for detail? If so, this might be the role for you. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK's largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution, and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime, and migration.

This role is working within the Secure Research Service (SRS) within the Research Services and Data Access Division (RSDA). The Secure Research Service (SRS) is an internationally recognised service that uses the Five Safes Framework to ensure researchers can access de-identified record level data securely. The RSDA division operates the service and ensures that once the researcher and their project are accredited, the data they require are quickly available to them. The team are required to act flexibly, to respond to new, urgent demands for access to data, while always ensuring data confidentiality.

The Operational Delivery Profession (ODP) is the largest profession in the Civil Service. ODP's 200,000+ members work in a wide range of operational delivery roles across government, providing essential services that support and protect UK citizens at home and overseas. They help to make ONS a great place to work. As a member, ODP supports you by providing learning and development opportunities, career pathways, tools and resources to help develop your skills and progress your career. This is an exciting opportunity to join a modern, innovative and inclusive Civil Service profession that sits at the heart of public service delivery.

This role manages the SRS Customer Support team to ensure a professional service is delivered to researchers using the Service. You will build and maintain successful working relationships with team members, and key internal and external stakeholders to improve the value of the service provided. You will use strong management and organisational skills to ensure effective delivery of our products and services. This post reports to the Head of SRS Customer Support.

In the SRS Customer Support role, you will guide researchers through the process of applying for accreditation, including supporting training and bookings for secure rooms. You will support the project application process including extensions and expiries. You also manage the ingest and output of data, all the while helping to maintain the security and integrity of the SRS by completing preliminary and ongoing checks.

• Managing the effective delivery of Customer Support Service ensuring the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are met by monitoring the inbox, managing the central tracker and ensuring that our part in multi-team processes is actioned quickly and other teams prompted where necessary.
• Managing incidents, ensuring they are dealt with quickly and effectively by identifying and communicating solutions, escalating to the appropriate team(s); ensuring the appropriate level of management is made aware; attending any related meetings to provide input and inform team of any actions.
• Building and maintaining teams to ensure they are motivated by collaborating and working well together in regular team meetings and with individual members to ensure there are no blockers or concerns that would cause issue with how the team operates as a whole.
• Encouraging and facilitating continuous improvement of the delivery team by identifying training for staff where appropriate; giving everyone equal opportunity to lead on work and line management of Administration Officers (AOs); assist where appropriate to help staff gain confidence in new skills or improve their existing ones to benefit the team.
• Manage updating of work instructions as the service and our requirements adapt over time.
• Managing the implementation of transitional changes to the live service by understanding the impact of those changes to business processes; communicating them to the team and supporting them with implementation, identifying any training requirements.
• Managing Digital Services and Top Level issues by creating tickets for support, monitoring tickets and attending weekly meetings to escalate any unresolved issues.
• Managing specific stakeholder relations and attending regular meetings to understand or communicate changes to the process and then updating the Customer Support team.
• Managing internal stakeholder relationships with other RSDA teams by attending meetings to understand or communicate changes to process and then updating the Customer Support team.
• Counter signatory for documentation required for researchers accessing the SRS, after checking all documentation is completed appropriately.
• Upload information into ONS systems to ensure a digital audit trail is maintained.

Essential Criteria:

• Line management experience, with the ability to organise and prioritise both personal and team workloads.
• Strong relationship‑building skills with internal and external stakeholders.
• Able to plan, forecast, estimate and manage schedules, coordinating work across teams.
• Committed to delivering timely, high‑quality results while fostering an open, collaborative environment that supports process improvement.
• Skilled at identifying and resolving challenges, particularly when taking on new activity or during periods of change.

Behaviours: We’ll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process: Changing and Improving, Managing a Quality Service, Communicating and Influencing, Working Together.

Alongside your salary of £34,587, Office for National Statistics contributes £10,019 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our valued colleagues across the organisation.

At ONS we are always looking to attract the very best people from the widest possible talent pool, and we are proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunities employer. As a Disability Confident Leader we’re committed to ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly throughout the recruitment process.