As a Water Customer Manager, you will provide leadership and performance management to a field-based customer team in a utility environment. You will be responsible for resolving customer appointments, complaints, and issues safely and efficiently, while managing budgets and collaborating with internal teams.
Requirements
Significant team leadership experience in a utility and/or mobile workforce environment
Experience in budget planning and management
Excellent communication, influencing, and negotiating skills
Proven ability to improve customer, safety, and productivity performance
No specific degree requirement stated in the posting
Skills & Responsibilities
Team leadership: Lead and directly manage a team of Water Customer Technicians, overseeing training, performance, and HR activities.
Complaint management: Resolve customer complaints promptly and manage compensation budgets to maintain company reputation.
Operational delivery: Monitor safety, service, and efficiency metrics to ensure SLAs and regulatory commitments are met.
Financial control: Manage Opex and Capex budgets, controlling costs and approving expenses for the geographical area.
Potential transition routes: People from operations management or customer service supervisory roles may bring transferable leadership and problem-solving skills, alongside meeting the required utility workforce experience.
Job description
The role
Provide leadership and performance management to the field based customer team.
Responsible for ensuring the timely and effective resolution of all customer appointments, issues and complaints. This is to be achieved through area based customer teams responsible for providing resolution to customer issues in a safe and increasingly efficient way, through customer focused leadership and direct performance management.
To ensure that the customer experience is proactively managed and issue resolution is communicated. This will also involve working collaboratively with teams within the ICC and Retail to identify and champion continuous improvements and problem solve.
What You Will Be Doing:
Customer Complaint & Stakeholder Management: Manage customer complaints and escalations promptly, maintain a positive company reputation, manage compensation budgets, and liaise with local authorities and third parties.
Team Leadership & Performance: Directly manage a team of Water Customer Technicians, oversee HR activities (training, succession planning, performance reviews), and ensure compliance with health and safety standards.
Operational Delivery & Resource Management: Monitor team performance on safety, service and efficiency, manage resource availability to meet SLAs, and collaborate with internal teams to ensure effective scheduling and workload management.
Financial & Budget Control: Manage Opex and Capex budgets for the geographical area, including forecasting, cost control, approval of expenses and overtime, and ensuring appropriate capitalisation of costs.
Incident Support & Regulatory Compliance: Provide operational support during incidents, attend post-incident reviews, ensure regulatory commitments and post-incident actions are met, and contribute to formal compensation and damage claims.
What We Are Looking For:
Significant team leadership experience in a utility and/or mobile workforce environment
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
Excellent influencing and negotiating skills with a strong customer focus.
Good problem solving skills.
Ability to improve customer, safety and productivity performance, evidenced by past results.
The ability to motivate a team and deliver high performance across a 24/7 service is fundamental to this role.
High competency level in motivation and coaching, in addition to the ability to manage underperformance.
Confident, self-motivated and capable of operating independently.
High standard of verbal and written communication skills.
Computer literate – able to interpret and act upon performance and operational data.
