Job title: Customer Service Officer
Salary: B3 £26,403 to £28,142
Hours: 37 full time
Contract: Permanent
Location: Contact Centre, Merrion House
As a Customer Service Officer in our Contact Centre, you will thrive on helping the citizens of Leeds, often using your own initiative and judgement in providing quality outcomes for potentially vulnerable people.
Our Contact Centre plays a vital role in helping the council to achieve its ambition to be the best city in the UK. We provide a first-class response to people in Leeds who need to access council services. We’re expanding our team and are currently recruiting Customer Service Officers on a full time basis. If you have applied for this role within the last 12 months, please do no reapply.
We will be holding an assessment centre for these roles on Friday 31st July. Interviews will be held week commencing 10th August and the start date for these roles will be Monday 28th September.
Leeds City Council is one of the largest employers in the region with over 14,000 employees. We seek to recruit and develop talented individuals who embody our council values and ambitions.
About you
As a Customer Service Officer, you will bring to the role:
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Resilience to pressure as at times you will have exposure to customers who may have distressing and complex personal circumstances.
- Passion about delivering exceptional customer service.
- The ability to recognise and act quickly and sensitively in cases of potential risk or high priority.
- The ability to promote digital options.
- The ability to work flexibly to meet the needs of your customers.
About the role
The enquiries we handle are wide ranging and cover most of the council’s key services, which means that the role is incredibly rewarding.
As our next Customer Service Officer, you’ll receive excellent training and equipment to be able to do your job.
The role is integral to our Customer Service Team within the Contact Centre, and you’ll be part of a team that could ultimately improve individual’s lives.
What we offer you
We take pride in offering the best employee experience, with benefits including:
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a competitive salary and annual leave entitlement plus statutory holidays
- membership of the West Yorkshire Pension Fund with generous employer contributions
- flexible and hybrid working arrangements subject to service requirements and successful completion of a 6 month probationary period.
- a clear career pathway and continuing professional development opportunities
- a range of staff benefits to help you boost your wellbeing and make your money go further
How to apply
Please complete the online application form.
Read our guidance for further advice on completing your application. In addition, we will not progress applications where there has been a clear use of AI to address the essential criteria, such as lack of personalisation or other typical features of AI written content.
If you have any queries or would like an informal chat about the role, please email Hannah at
[email protected]
We welcome applications from everyone and actively seek a diverse range of applicants from all backgrounds and cultures. We particularly encourage applications from, but not limited to, women, carers, veterans as well as LGBT+, ethnically diverse, disabled and care experienced people.
This role is based in the UK. Home Office guidance states that candidates must evidence their right to work in the UK prior to commencing employment, either as a UK or Irish citizen, under the EU Settlement scheme or having secured any other relevant work visa.
If you do not have the right to work in the UK, you must consider your own eligibility for sponsorship for a particular role through the Skilled Worker visaroute before applying. To be eligible for sponsorship you'll usually need to be paid the standard salary rate of at least £41,700 per year or meet one of the other eligibility criteria. Please ensure you are eligible before applying.
Job Description
Job purpose: To provide high-quality, front-line advice and support to customers at the Council’s Contact Centre. To ensure that a responsive, professional and caring service is always provided to all customers across all channels. To maintain a thorough knowledge of customer issues, processes and related services to enable you to deal with and resolve customer enquiries without assistance, and to direct customers to the correct contact point in complex cases.
Responsibilities
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To provide the highest level of service to customers and always maintain a polite and professional manner.
- To take ownership of customer contact and to resolve most enquiries for council services without assistance, sometimes with the aid of support materials. Remaining focussed and completing tasks to a high standard despite the competing demands and potential emotional pressure of the role.
- To arrange for customers to receive specialist advice if needed, and to contact Council departments and other agencies and make appointments for customers as necessary.
- To deal with difficult situations effectively, and to be polite and professional and to adapt your approach in diffusing the situation.
- To be able to recognise and act quickly and sensitively in cases of potential risk or high priority
- To have a good knowledge of customer service techniques, principle of service standards, processes and procedures, and the ability to apply them to the Contact Centre environment whilst constantly achieving excellent customer satisfaction.
- To be aware of and promote digital options and notify opportunities for improvements to customer service through application of digital solutions in all aspects of customer contact,
- To enter into positive, persuasive and controlled dialogue with customers, employing customer service techniques and to balance quality of contact and outcomes with productivity.
- To deal with non-Council enquiries within agreed guidelines.
- To be aware of and maintain knowledge of Council procedures, services and IT systems and related community services, and to advise or direct customers appropriately.
- To follow escalation procedures for service failures and know when to escalate cases to a manager or senior officer where these have been exhausted.
- To negotiate payment arrangements and process payments for invoices as required
- To respond to non-telephony contact using correct spelling, grammar and to specified timescales, ensuring the highest level of service to customers.
- To support and advise new and existing staff as appropriate and undertaking a ‘buddying’ or coaching role.
- To demonstrate Contact Centre functions to visitors as appropriate.
- To keep up to date with all relevant service developments, and to work in partnership with other Departments and agencies to ensure optimum service delivery.
- To undertake and complete administrative procedures within the Contact Centre as required.
- To ensure effective and efficient input to recording systems and assist in the development and promotion of new and existing Information Technology systems.
- To maintain complete confidentiality at all times and to sign a declaration to that effect.
- To fully understand and adhere to the requirements of Data Protection legislation, treating customer information as a valuable asset, maintaining its accuracy and protecting its security
- To work individually and as part of a team to ensure your key performance indicators, objectives and targets are met.
- To work in a cooperative environment and share knowledge of best practice with colleagues and managers across the service where appropriate
- To use own initiative and judgement where appropriate, providing outcomes and solutions for customers from a range of options.
- To be resilient to pressure as at times there may be exposure to customers who may be highly emotional e.g. demonstrated through verbal aggression, and who may have distressing and complex personal circumstances.
- To support customer service delivery by responding to service queues and other service channels, prioritising effectively.
- To work flexibly to meet the needs of customers, and the ongoing development of the service
- To contribute actively to the development and promotion of customer services.
- The duties outlined are not meant as an exhaustive list and will also comprise any other duties within the spirit of the post commensurate with the job evaluation outcome for this post.
Essential requirements Candidates will only be shortlisted if they can demonstrate that they meet all the following essential requirements.
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Totally committed to excellent customer care and putting the customer at the heart of everything you do.
- Ability to deal efficiently and effectively with a wide range of enquiries
- Ability to adapt your style and communicate effectively by telephone and in writing with a wide variety of people in a polite and tactful manner
- Ability to take ownership of customer enquiries and to resolve most enquiries without assistance, sometimes with the aid of support materials.
- Ability to work in partnership with other departments and agencies to improve service delivery.
- Good literacy and numeracy skills.
- Ability to work on own initiative, accept responsibility and make decisions within agreed criteria. Only referring to your manager for non-routine issues
- Good organisational and interpersonal skills.
- Ability to learn new IT packages and skills. Produce basic reports and information that is accurate with minimal need for checking
- Ability to contribute to team building and team working
- Ability to be resilient to pressure and to be able to deal with highly emotional customers
- Good knowledge of customer service skills and processes.
- Willing to accept responsibility to comply with procedures and legislations relating to confidential information
- Experience of working to customer care standards.
- Experience of working as part of a team to meet targets and deliver a responsive service improving customer outcomes.
- Experience of working with several IT applications, and systems to efficiently retrieve and record information including Microsoft Office.
- Experience of negotiating payment arrangements or processing payments.
Essential Behavioural & other Characteristics
- Understand and embrace Leeds City Council values and behaviours and codes of conduct
- Committed to continuous improvement in all areas and work towards delivering the Leeds Ambitions of health and wellbeing, inclusive growth, thriving strong communities, and a resilient sustainable city
- Able to understand and observe Leeds City Council policies and procedures
- Carry out duties having regard to an employee’s responsibility under Health, Safety and Wellbeing
- Participate in appraisal, training and development activities to ensure up, to date knowledge and skills
- Be aware of and support difference and ensure equality for all working in an anti-discriminatory manner, upholding equality and diversity of Leeds City Council
- Recognise and appropriately challenge any incidents of racism, bullying, harassment, victimisation, and any form of abuse, reporting any concerns to the appropriate person
- Flexible and adaptable to change to assist other services as required commensurate to grade.
- The Council has adopted a flexibility protocol and the role will be expected to work within these parameters
Desirable requirements Candidates are not required to meet all the following desirable requirements however these may be used to distinguish between candidates.
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Experience of working with customers in a busy operational role, owning and resolving customer enquires with little assistance
- Experience of using Automated Call Distribution technology, and/or a Customer Relationship Management system
