Head of Customer Management

About us

At National Grid, we are at the heart of shaping a secure, affordable, and clean energy future. We are investing around £60bn over five years in our networks in the UK and the US, with a range of ground-breaking projects to expand our networks.

Our Electricity Transmission (ET) business unit owns and operates the high-voltage electricity network in England and Wales, including around 4.5k miles of overhead line, 900 miles of underground cable, and more than 300 substations, moving electricity from where it is generated to our direct customers and the distribution companies delivering power to homes and businesses.

Job purpose

Our ET business is experiencing significant growth from customers looking to connect to our network, as a result of both decarbonisation policy and new demand connections driven by societal needs, such as the building of data centres or steel works. Our business engages with large corporate organisations on significant high-profile projects.

Our Customer Management team provides a single end-to-end point of contact, forming deep strategic partnerships with these customers, managing an increasingly complex portfolio of projects. The team translates customer feedback into customer intelligence and insight, driving strategic action to improve our service.

The Head of Customer Management will balance the needs of individual customers against action required to improve our customer experience across the board, working closely with colleagues across the business to share information regarding our customers’ needs. The person in post will lead a team responsible for maximising and collecting annual licensed and unlicensed revenue, delivering new customer connections, developing revenue portfolios, and implementing new tools and processes to improve the customer experience across the ET business.

This role provides strategic direction within ET, to ensure we adopt an externally-focussed, customer-centric approach to decision-making.

Key accountabilities

• Own ET’s customer experience strategy and delivery roadmap, anticipating customer need and translating that into actionable business priorities. This includes both transformation of activity to deliver the existing connections process, and leading cross-industry work to reform the process
• Manage escalations of customer concerns and complaints
• Manage and ensure compliance against ET’s Connection Licence obligations
• Accountable for relationships with strategic partners to deliver customer outputs and other TOs in relation to connections
• Lead a team of five direct reports, with a wider team of 70 people
• Responsible for ensuring close working relationships with other departments across ET to deliver value and service for customers
• Ensure we provide a responsive service for new enquiries into our business, delivering competitive offers of connection
• Ensure customer and stakeholder insight influences strategic priorities and business decisions
• Own ET’s stakeholder engagement strategy
• Lead on ET’s transition to a customer and stakeholder-led business (in RIIO-2 and beyond)
• Accountable for delivery against our RIIO-2 customer and stakeholder commitments and Board Stakeholder Charter
• Represent ET at industry/other external customer/stakeholder events
• Accountable for the customer relationships and commercial position related to the connections process and to our unlicensed business
• Responsible for meeting unlicensed revenue targets

Candidate profile

• A strategic leader in customer management / customer relationship / account management
• Strong experience of managing large corporate accounts, able to influence customers and partner organisations
• A track record of driving commercial value and performance through major contracts
• Strong internal and external stakeholder management skills, able to build senior-level relationships and act as a strategic partner
• Experience of leading significant transformation and change programmes
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, capable of leading and influencing large, devolved teams, and gaining support and commitment from a wider operational group
• Able to translate data, analysis, and insights from a broad range of sources into compelling business strategies and plans
• Proven success in influencing and negotiating with senior stakeholders, customers, external bodies, and industry decision-makers

More Information

Location: the role will be based in Warwick, with the person likely on-site around 2-3 days per week on average.

Salary: competitive base salary plus commensurate benefits.

The role will close for applications on Monday 2nd March at 23:59 GMT.