Customer Director - Sunderland, SR5 3XB

Make a Home at Taylor Wimpey. At Taylor Wimpey, we don't just build houses; we build futures. Not just for the people who live in our homes, but for our own people too. When we bring our collective skills together, we make amazing things happen - for ourselves, for each other and for our customers. There are incredible opportunities on your doorstep, and we want you to discover them all. With 22 regional offices across the UK and operations in Spain, we bring our vision to life locally. Here, you'll be given the tools to develop your skills and the freedom to explore new avenues. Share your ideas, experience a no-blame culture, and shape your work around your life. Every single one of us plays a vital role in bringing to life incredible places and spaces, where anyone can thrive. We believe in making a positive difference to our planet, as well as to people. Home to work that matters, and you can be a part of it.

Job Summary: The Customer Director plays a key strategic role in driving the customer culture of the Business Unit, acting as Voice of the Customer at board level to influence forward-looking actions that deliver an improving customer experience and using data and insights to drive more customer-focused thinking and behaviours. In conjunction with fellow board members, they also input into the overall strategic direction of the Business Unit and play an active role in contributing to decisions on all elements of the Business Unit strategy, business plans and cost management, including land purchase, planning applications, build direction and sales strategies. The role holder is specifically responsible for leading the Customer Service function and is expected to provide inspiring leadership so that their team delivers best-in-class service. They should also identify best practice from a customer perspective to drive change and improve satisfaction throughout the customer journey, from reservation through to successful home ownership.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Demonstrates role model customer behaviours.
• Acts as an inspirational role model across the BU in the delivery of great customer service and is relentless in communicating the customer message.
• Sets the tone of importance of customer across the BU and always demonstrates positive behaviour when discussing or interacting with customers.
• Develops strong working partnerships with their peers and across functions to encourage seeing homes through the eyes of our customers.
• Identifies skills-gap in customer engagement ability across the BU and develops appropriate plans to improve customer interactions.
• Regularly engages with customers to keep close to the good and bad experiences they have throughout their end-to-end journey.
• Proactively engages in the appointment and management of contractors and suppliers to ensure their impact on the customer experience is to the expected standard.
• Ensures reputational risk is minimised by managing complaints and social media contacts and acts as final point of escalation for complaints where required.
• Provides inspiring leadership.
• Role models and champions Taylor Wimpey's values by always behaving with integrity and professionalism, acting in a positive, collaborative and encouraging style with everyone in the BU.
• Builds a strong team ethos, promoting shared values and has the ability to get the best out of others.
• Treats everyone fairly and with respect, ensuring team members feel valued, included and connected and takes a genuine interest in them.
• Inspires and develops team to build their knowledge and skill-set to deliver best-in-class customer service and ensures strong succession plans are in place to mitigate future risk around performance.
• Drives team to consistently achieve quantitative and qualitative SLAs, regularly calibrates their performance and gives quality feedback.
• Recognises and rewards the right attitude, behaviour and performance.
• Demonstrates resilience and an ability to hold others to account.
• Takes responsibility for their own ongoing development, by remaining up to date with external customer service trends and innovations, investing in their professional development and regularly asking for feedback on their performance to ensure ongoing performance improvements.
• Actively seeks to identify and address barriers to diversity and inclusion.

Experience, Qualifications, Technical Requirements:

• A board-level disciplined director or an individual who is ready for that next step in their career.
• Extensive experience of leading teams in a customer-facing environment.
• Working at a senior level in a customer-focused environment and influencing customer strategy.
• Experienced in face-to-face customer contact and complaint handling, including written communications.
• Experienced in management information analysis and implementing improvements to systems and processes based on relevant data.
• Experienced in understanding business performance data and reporting.
• Experienced in the use of technology to deliver an improving customer experience.
• Excellent relationship management with well-formed influencing and networking skills.
• Proven budgetary management and commercial experience.
• Working in a pressured environment but able to remain calm, measured, and resilient.
• Experience and knowledge of house-building and related industries.
• Experience in managing people through change.
• Breadth of customer experience from different industries.
• Experience of external, outside-looking benchmarking.

What we offer at Taylor Wimpey: At Taylor Wimpey, we are committed to enabling you to make a home with us. Our work is not just about building homes; it's about doing work that matters, making a positive impact on the lives of our customers and the communities we serve. We enjoy many benefits as standard, including excellent retail discounts, company funded life insurance and private healthcare, and access to a quality pension scheme with company contributions. We also offer our discounted house purchase scheme, car leasing scheme and share plans, as well as the opportunity to tailor your benefit package to suit your needs with options such as buying extra annual leave or adding dependants to your benefit cover. Our total reward offer works perfectly with our culture, we are a welcoming community where everyone can feel at home. We create a home to your future by providing opportunities for growth and development. We offer industry leading professional training and development, which supports you to unlock your potential and fulfil your career and personal goals in a variety of opportunities and environments. We look to develop our people in the skills and areas they are most interested in, leveraging your qualities and appreciating your unique competencies, skills and expertise that, when we come together, make this a great place to work. If you want to do work that matters and build a career that lasts, make a home at Taylor Wimpey.

Inclusivity Statement: As a proud Disability Confident Employer, Taylor Wimpey is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workforce. We actively collaborate with individuals who have disabilities and long-term health conditions which have an effect on their ability to do normal daily activities, ensuring that barriers are eliminated when it comes to employment opportunities. In line with our commitment, we guarantee an interview to applicants who declare to us during the application process that they have a disability and meet the minimum requirements for the role. Join us in building a truly diverse and empowered team.

Internal Applicants: Please inform your line manager if you wish to apply for this role.