Head of Customer Strategy

Who are we?

South Western Railway (SWR) operates over 1,500 services each weekday across the network and employs more than 5,000 people. We provide easy and convenient mobility, connecting people and communities in South West London, southern counties of England, and the Isle of Wight.

Join our team and help us continue to bring people together to get the most out of life.

About the job

The Head of Customer Strategy is responsible for leading and developing a team to identify and develop the culture, processes, performance improvements and efficiencies to deliver an exceptional experience for SWR customers.

Establish this new role and make SWR a customer driven business through the development of a customer strategy and a significant cultural shift, particularly with operational teams, to ensure its delivery.

Your main responsibilities will be:

• Ensure the continual delivery and ongoing improvement of the things that really matter to our customers - delivering a positive experience that our customers can rely on by:
  • Identifying the end-to-end journey needs of our customers and create a prioritised strategic plan to ensure SWR delivers an exceptional customer experience. Set service standards across all touch points, support departments to meet these standards and monitor/report against delivery.
  • Ensuring customers have helpful, accessible and timely information at all times, with a specific focus on information during disruption.
  • Building and leading a high-performing team that collaborates effectively with the business to get it to meet the needs of our customers
• Create the annual business plan for our customer strategy. Deliver associated Business Plan Commitments and KPIs. Report on the delivery of BPCs and KPIs to the DfT and ensure we achieve a minimum PBF score of 2.
• Develop and deliver a SMART customer experience strategy that ensures we have a thorough and prioritised understanding of our customers' needs and constantly deliver against them, including their accessibility and inclusion needs
• Incorporate the strategy into the DfT's annual business planning process. Manage the periodic reporting process, ensuring the DfT evaluators are able to properly understand what we are doing and how we are performing; with the aim of getting a minimum PBF score of 2.
• Identify the end-to-end journey needs of our customers and create a prioritised strategic plan to ensure SWR delivers an exceptional customer experience. This plan will involve both new and/or improved processes and new and/or improved service/product initiatives.
• Responsible for leading their team and the business to identify what needs to be improved or introduced and make this happen (delivering on time, on specification and on budget).
• Keep up-to-date with customer needs though an effective programme of market research that produces timely, concise, clear and actionable reports, gaining insights through the use of data and analytics.
• Through an understanding of our customer needs drive a step-change in our delivery of customer service, focussing on what really matters and delivering against this to drive quality and consistency, by setting and managing service standards that need to be delivered by other teams; and engaging and challenging these teams to meet these standards.
• Keep up-to-date with customer experience developments and innovations in both rail and other sectors; constantly searching for ideas that are relevant to our customers and will improve their experience when travelling with us.
• Develop, implement and maintain a plan (encompassing standards, processes and technology) to ensure customers have helpful, accessible and timely information during disruption. Put in place measures to assess performance against these standards and manage achievement of them.
• Lead the overall provision of information to customers (e.g., engineering work, strikes etc.,) through all channels to make sure customers always have helpful, timely and accurate information.
• Through engagement with interest groups, the industry and the DfT develop and implement an accessibility and inclusion plan that meets customers' current and future needs.
• Representing SWR externally with regard to our delivery of our customer experience strategy.
• Be a thought leader in this field by developing knowledge of best practice through relationships with useful contacts in other organisations and sectors.
• Providing positive and inspired leadership to all Customer Strategy team members, setting clear performance expectations, accountabilities and feedback. Identify and nurture talent and leadership development for key roles, but also be proactive in addressing poor performance.

You'll need to be:

Education

• Ideally degree level

Essential:   

• Customer first approach – the natural ability to, before all else, first see the world from the viewpoint of our customers.
• Strategic thinking and vision – able to think clearly and strategically, and articulate this is a vision and strategy that meets our customers' needs.
• Natural focus on the needs/improvements that will bring the biggest benefit to our customers, and the sense of urgency and determination to make it happen at speed

About the location

South Western Railways HQ is based on the 4th Floor at South Bank Central, a stone's throw from the River Thames and a 10 minute walk from our busiest station, Waterloo. It is local to many well-known attractions, restaurants and retail facilities and is easily accessible by public transport. 

Working pattern

Working an average of 37 hours per week over 5 days

Standard working pattern 

The Reward

In return we offer a competitive salary and a variety of valuable benefits, including:

• Free duty and leisure travel on SWR services for employees
• Free leisure travel for spouse/partner and dependants (criteria dependent)
• 75% discount on many other train operating companies
• Full training and support with development
• Excellent pension scheme

We all belong at SWR. Our vision is to provide an inclusive environment for all colleagues, ensuring all candidates have an equal opportunity to access meaningful employment.

We value our differences such as age, gender, LGBTQIA+, ethnicity, religion, and disability. We maintain a zero tolerance towards any form of prejudice towards our colleagues, customers, and future talent.

We celebrate and encourage diversity of thought, progressive ways of working and seeing all our colleagues grow and thrive.

If you require additional support to complete your application due to a disability or neurodivergent condition, for example, dyslexia, dyspraxia, or autism, please follow the links below.  We encourage you to share any additional needs you may require so we can provide a fair and equal process for all who apply.

https://exceptionalindividuals.com/neurodiversity/

https://www.healthassured.org/blog/neurodiversity/