Director, Customer-Led Growth (Customer Experience)

Director, Customer-Led Growth (Customer Experience)

About The Foundation

The Foundation is a customer-led growth consultancy. We help organisations see the world from where their customers stand and give them the conviction to act on what they find.

Most businesses approach growth from the inside out, shaped by internal measures, structures and assumptions that keep them further from customers than they realise. It is rarely a lack of intent. Our work helps leaders understand the problems customers need to solve and the outcomes they want, so they can earn customers' decisions by creating genuine value for them.

We are a small team working with large organisations and senior leaders. That means real responsibility, close collaboration and the freedom to take things forward yourself.

Our purpose: We exist to create customer-led success

Helping organisations put the people they serve first, making things better for their customers, succeeding on their own terms as a result.

Our values

• Ambitious. What we are trying to achieve for ourselves and our clients is new, difficult and very stretching.
• Challenging. We can't reach that ambition without challenging our clients, each other and lots of conventions.
• Positive. Challenge can be uncomfortable, so we bring optimism and energy to everything we do.
• Together. Our best work comes from combining our skills, experiences and perspectives with those of our clients.
• With integrity. We keep choosing to do the right thing, which builds trust within our team, with clients and with their customers.

About the role

We are looking for a Director who is, first and foremost, a customer-led growth leader, with real experience in and enthusiasm for customer experience. You will lead complex projects with senior client teams, bring in new work, and play an active part in leading The Foundation alongside the Partners.

You will bring an outside-in perspective to clients' strategic choices, using customer insight to challenge assumptions and develop ideas for growth. You will help leaders see what matters to their customers and turn that understanding into a clear direction for the experiences they create.

Much of your work will sit within our Customer Experience area, helping clients create experience visions and strategies, and design experiences that improve customers' lives. You will also work on projects across our other areas, Customer Strategy and Customer-Led Leadership, as clients' needs change and as demand for our work varies.

All our projects share a way of working: helping clients see the world from the outside in and, just as importantly, believe they will succeed by acting on what they find.

What you'll do

The role covers three areas, in line with how we describe every role at The Foundation.

Doing brilliant work

You will lead large and complex customer-led growth projects, many of them centred on customer experience, keeping the focus on outcomes for clients and their customers as scope and circumstances change. You will turn customer insight into experience visions, strategic choices and ideas for better experiences, helping leaders build conviction in the direction they take. You will work directly with executive teams and senior leaders, staying confident and clear when much is uncertain, and earning their trust so they see you as their primary adviser.

You will lead teams of consultants and associates to deliver high-quality work, involving the Partners where they add most: building on already strong work, supporting senior relationships and checking quality.

We would expect you to:

• Listen well and draw out what really matters from what customers and clients say and do.
• Simplify complexity accurately, distilling rather than cutting, so clients recognise and own the answer.
• Write and speak in plain, human language.
• Design and guide customer research, turning evidence about people's lives and behaviour into insights that shape strategy.
• Generate and develop ideas with clients, translating insight into experience visions and designs, with clear measures of success.
• Design and run workshops with clear direction and a positive spirit, challenging where it helps.
• Manage demanding client relationships, including executive groups who are not yet sure of the need.
• Deliver accurately and on time, with real attention to detail.

Growing relationships and revenue

You will help grow our customer-led growth work, with a particular role in developing our customer experience relationships and thinking. That means building relationships, sharing our point of view and earning opportunities to help, developing existing clients into long-term relationships and bringing new ones through your own network.

You will take the lead on proposals and pitches, bringing together a team to create compelling responses that show our insight and approach against a client's real challenge. You will also be an active voice for The Foundation's thinking, through writing, LinkedIn, events and conversations. We would love you to bring a clear customer-led perspective to what is happening across the CX world, so that people who care about this area come to know us.

At Director level we would expect you to contribute around £200k of revenue a year that wouldn't have happened without you, across project extensions, new projects with existing clients and new projects with new clients.

Running our business

You will be an influential colleague, manager and leader. You will coach and develop consultants, both as a line manager and through projects, so they grow in confidence and capability. Our team should seek you out because they enjoy working with you and trust you to champion their development. Alongside the Partners and other senior colleagues, you will help shape and challenge The Foundation's growth plan, and lead internal work where it is needed.

About you

You are a customer-led growth practitioner first. You will have spent a good part of your career helping organisations understand what matters to their customers and change how they work as a result, and you will have seen that work make a real difference.

Customer experience is a familiar area to you where you have plenty of experience. You know the field well, from how experience strategy is set, to how experiences are designed, to how they are measured, and you keep up with what is changing. What interests you most is how an organisation brings everything it does, its strategy, structures, measures and everyday decisions, into line around the customer. You think naturally from the outside in, and you have the conviction to share inconvenient customer truths and help leaders act on them.

Experience we need

• Agency or consultancy experience. This is essential. You will have worked in a consultancy, research, design or strategy agency, and know what it takes to lead projects, manage client relationships and win work in that setting.
• Customer-led growth. You have helped senior leaders make strategic choices based on what their customers value, and helped their organisations change to deliver on them.
• Customer experience strategy and design. You have hands-on experience using customer insight and ideation to develop experience visions, strategies and designs, and can show the impact your work had. You understand how to measure success and follow what is changing in the CX world.
• Senior client leadership. You are credible with executive teams and comfortable shaping their thinking, including when they are unsure or sceptical.
• Winning work. You have led proposals and pitches that succeeded, and you have a network you can build on.
• Developing people. You have managed and coached others and enjoy helping them grow.

Qualities that matter to us

You are sharp, a good listener and keen to keep learning. You hold a firm belief in customer-led ideals alongside a practical sense of how things get done in business, and you can reconcile the two.

You will thrive in a smaller business, where you have the freedom to take things forward yourself, the proactivity to take things forward without waiting to be asked and the habit of doing it together with others. You share our values and will help others live them too.

Role Level

We expect to appoint at Director level. For the right person with slightly less senior experience, we would also consider Senior Consultant, with a clear path to Director.

Salary and benefits

• The salary band for Senior Consultant (SC2) is £75,000 – £100,000 and for Director (D1) is £100,000 - £120,000 dependent on experience . (Please note during the interview process we will assess you against the grade most appropriate for your experience. We are open to considering hiring at different grades if we find a brilliant candidate).
• A company performance related bonus of 17.5% (SC2) or 25% (D1) paid in April
• Additional 6% employer contribution to your pension (commencing 6 months after joining)
• 22 days holiday, in addition to the period between Christmas and New Year each year and increasing by 1 day for every year of service after the first 2 years, until 25 days after 4 years
• We offer medical insurance, PHI (Permanent Health Insurance) and a Group Life Scheme

Location

The position will be based at our office in King’s Cross. We work on a principle of being ‘better together than apart’ so whilst we do allow for flexible working, we encourage people to be in the office as much as possible. The current common practice is working in the office between 3-4 days per week. This needs to be flexible around our clients’ requirements.

Interested?

If you think this role might be for you, please send a cover note and CV to our Head of Operations, Serena Luff, at sluff@the-foundation.com.