As the Head of Customer Journey Management, you will assume ownership and optimisation of our critical end-to-end customer experiences across a two-year horizon. This responsibility extends across all Sainsbury’s brands and channels, with a particular focus on either GM or Food. You will work with the business to champion our customers at every touchpoint in our core customers journeys. By leveraging journey mapping, data analytics, and insights, you will prioritise pain points and identify innovative solutions. Collaborating closely with leadership teams and subject matter experts from both Sainsbury’s and Argos, you will drive the implementation of customer experience enhancements through engagement, education, and support. You will help to grow the customer journey management capability across the customer care team and support driving our strategic vision to have a customer first culture across the business. Furthermore, you will play a pivotal role in cultivating a customer-centric culture throughout the organisation. Your expertise will empower the customer care team and contribute to our overarching goal of putting the customer first in all aspects of our business.

What you need to do:

• Responsible for overseeing our customer journeys, identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement. By tracking performance metrics and KPIs, you’ll proactively identify areas where enhancements are needed.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive strategic planning. Prioritise enhancements for the current year and future roadmaps
• Monitor and analyse customer journey performance metrics and KPIs (such as CSAT, Pain points, complaints and contact volumes); to track our customer experience performance
• Leverage analytics data and customer insights to understand behaviour. Use this knowledge to inform the design and optimisation of our customer experience
• Represent the customer in all interactions across the business to support our strategic customer vision and deliver against our customer outcomes
• Ensure our customer journeys align with our brand promise. Create more mission focussed experiences, that resonate with our customers, whether they engage with us in-store or online
• Upskill and influence the business to co-create, deliver and embed improvements to our customer experiences over the 2 year horizon
• Demonstrate the commercial impact of customer experience improvements. Showcase how enhancing customer journeys positively affects our business outcomes.
• Collaborate with senior internal stakeholders across divisions to deliver a cohesive customer experience. Influence their priorities and roadmaps to maintain consistency for customers
• Provide CX assurance by aligning decisions with our CX principles and standards. Uphold the highest standards of customer satisfaction.
• Lead experimentation initiatives to optimise the customer experience. Test hypotheses and collaborate with Customer Journey Managers to implement impactful solutions
• Partner with Heads of Customer Experience Design and CX Research & improvement to prioritise initiatives and design solutions
• Lead change from initial experimentation to developing scalable solutions and drive delivery through relevant stakeholders and cross functional teams – to plan and deliver customer experience improvements focusing on 0-2 years
• Provide CX advice, insight and guidance to teams across the business, using data and continuous journey measurement to demonstrate the impact of active orchestration of the customer journey
• Build, lead and inspire a high performing team of up to 5 Customer Journey Managers and a delivery manager; working across our channels and brands. Foster their growth and align their efforts toward exceptional customer experiences.
• Provide strong, visible leadership to help deliver a positive open and inclusive culture where colleagues can reach their full potential
• Lead on the engagement and upskilling on journey mapping and tooling within Customer Experience Design and Product Experience Design
• Role model and embed Sainsbury’s valued behaviours of Own it, Make it Better and Be human. Focus on the action we all need to take and ensure we’re making a difference for our customers and colleagues.

What you need to know and show:

• Excellent customer journey management experience across both digital and physical retail channels
• Proven experience in a leadership role within Customer Experience, Experience Design, Customer Journey Management or similar, with the ability to evidence owning and optimising end-to-end customer experience, across on and offline journeys
• A track record in developing and implementing customer journey strategies and initiatives. Your decisions are informed by CSAT scores and other critical business metrics
• A passion for customer centricity combined with good commercial awareness, to deliver impactful change that benefits both customers and the business
• Excellent communication skills with ability to build strong relationships spans all levels, including influencing at the board level. You thrive in a complex organisational landscape
• Strong analytical skills with ability to make data driven decisions
• Experience leading and developing high performing teams, with a focus on coaching, mentoring and development
• Solid understanding of transformation/project management methodologies with ability to integrate plans with and influence wider business roadmaps
• Identify opportunities to make the way we work simpler for customer and colleagues
• Ability to encourage data-driven, goal-oriented decisions. Spearhead rapid learning by championing new approaches, including experimentation.
• Inspire and engage leadership teams, and colleagues more broadly across the business, driving the organisation to think customer first
• Gravitas and the ability to influence a broad range of stakeholders with credibility, facts and judgement that builds their understanding of how what they do impacts the customer
• Flexibility and adaptability in a fast-paced environment, with the skill to handle multiple priorities, meet deadlines and work with ambiguity
• Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, capable of building strong relationships and influencing both internal and external stakeholders
• Excellent understanding of industry trends, emerging customer experience strategies and technologies

It would be desirable if you have:

• Experience of specialist journey mapping and measurement management tools to prioritise, measure and track journeys, using these to drive high engagement and customer awareness across the business
• Solid knowledge of prototyping to deliver rapid learning and how to execute this in a large organisation
• Sound Retail experience both in-store and online

What decisions I can make including budget:

• Shaping and growing the Customer Journey Management team
• Establishing the approaches, processes, and practice of Customer Journey management at Sainsburys

Directly or indirectly manages:

Team of Customer Journey Managers

Support we will provide:

• Access to excellent range of development tools, internal mentoring etc.
• Enrolment in our Leading Steps up programme to drive leadership development

Qualifications

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 65% of salary, depending on how we perform (in cash and shares).

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. You'll also receive a company car cash allowance unless you are going to travel 10,000 business miles in your role, then you'll be able to choose a car. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibiity criteria may apply).

Responsibilities

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. As the link between sellers and buyers, retail and head office, our retail operations team is the cog that keeps things running. With teams focused on store facing, labour, transformation, online, delivery and contact centre work, we touch almost every part of the business. It’s an incredibly fast-paced environment where you need to pivot not just daily, but often hourly. So while we plan all we can, it’s vital that we all think outside our job descriptions and look to optimise and improve how we do everything. There’s also a real team ethos. After all, it’s people like you who are going to truly transform this part of the business.