At Avanti West Coast, we're passionate about creating exceptional journeys for our customers and an engaging environment for our colleagues. We're looking for a talented Customer Experience Manager to lead frontline management teams and drive operational excellence across our network.
You do not need rail experience to be successful in this role.
If you've led large teams in sectors such as retail, hospitality, logistics, transport, healthcare, customer service, leisure, facilities management, or other operational environments, we'd love to hear from you. Your leadership experience, ability to inspire people while raising standards are what matter most.
As a Customer Experience Manager, you'll lead a team of Station Managers responsible for circa 350 frontline colleagues across multiple locations, driving outstanding customer service, operational performance and colleague engagement. You'll play a key role in creating high-performing teams, delivering business results and maintaining the highest standards of safety across your region. Working closely with a range of stakeholders, you will identify opportunities for improvement, support colleague development, lead through change and play a critical role during operational disruption, ensuring customers and colleagues remain safe, informed and supported.
What You'll Be Doing
Leading and developing a team of Station Managers across multiple locations.
Creating a culture of engagement, accountability, feedback and continuous improvement.
Maintaining a safety-first culture, ensuring the highest standards of customer and colleague safety are maintained.
Driving customer satisfaction, operational performance and service delivery against key business measures and KPIs.
Supporting and coaching managers to create engaged, high-performing teams and develop future talent.
Building strong relationships with trade unions, industry partners and internal stakeholders to deliver positive outcomes for customers, colleagues and the business.
Ensuring effective management of attendance, wellbeing, colleague welfare and performance.
Leading initiatives to improve operational efficiency, service quality and customer experience.
Managing budgets, resources and workforce planning to deliver safe, efficient and commercially sound operations.
Engaging with stakeholders across the wider business to ensure safe and effective service delivery.
Leading through change and helping teams adapt to evolving business needs.
Playing a key role during operational disruption and incident response, ensuring customers and colleagues remain safe and supported.
Take a look at the role profile for more information.
What We're Looking For
We're interested in people with transferable leadership skills who can bring fresh thinking and experience from other industries.
You'll likely have:
The ability to balance safety, people, customer and commercial priorities in a complex operational environment.
Experience leading managers and large frontline teams in a fast-paced operational environment.
A proven track record of delivering performance and customer outcomes through people.
Experience developing high-performing teams through coaching, succession planning and colleague development.
Strong customer focus and a passion for service excellence.
Experience managing performance, engagement, attendance and colleague wellbeing.
Commercial awareness and an understanding of operational KPIs and business performance measures.
Excellent communication, influencing and stakeholder management skills
Experience working across multiple sites, locations or departments.
The ability to make decisions, solve problems and remain calm under pressure.
Strong planning, organisational and budgeting skills.
As well as working with a fantastic team you will also receive:
Railway Pension Scheme
Free travel on Avanti West Coast for you/spouse/partner/dependents
Privilege Travel card (75% off other train operators fares for leisure travel)
30 days holiday rising by 1 for every completed year of service to a maximum of 37 days (inclusive of bank holidays)
10 free journeys on other First Group Train Operators
We reserve the right to withdraw this advert at any time due to high volumes of applications.
At Avanti West Coast, we value the differences that make each of us outstanding! Avanti West Coast recognises the benefits of building a diverse workforce and employing people from diverse backgrounds, which includes their race, religion, age, gender, gender identity, disability, and sexual orientation.
Everyone who joins Avanti West Coast becomes part of our close-knit team. We're committed to ensuring that Avanti West Coast is inclusive, a place where people are encouraged to be themselves, and not an edited version to fit in. A place where differences are encouraged, recognised, accepted and put to good use.
