It makes interesting reading. The skills required are broad and yet quite specific at the same time.
So as you read ask yourself these questions "Do I have anyone in my business doing this? If others are gearing up this way what's stopping me?"
Let me know your thoughts.
Iven
SunLife - Director, Customer Experience
Toronto, ON
Overview
The Director, Customer Experience is a newly created leadership position, working with business and IT partners to deliver an industry leading e-business experience. This role is key in Customer Solutions’ vision to provide value-added, innovative, and easy to use integrated e-business offerings. The Director leads a virtual team of e-business professionals within Group Benefits, Group Retirement Services, and Individual focused on customer experience, ensuring alignment of our brands, standards, education, training, tools, templates, and managing key partnerships with our business and IT partners, external entities, and other key stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities/Job Functions
- Work with the business areas (Group Benefits, Group Retirement Services, Individual, Customer Solutions, Public & Corporate Affairs), IT teams (Group Benefits, Group Retirement Services, Individual, Shared Application Services), and external organizations (customers, alliance partners/vendors) to ensure the development, delivery and integration of a high quality customer experience that will enhance value for users and enable the business units to meet their business objectives. This consulting role provides the expert advice and guidance to all areas involved in e-business design and publishing on all external Canadian sites.
- Provides program management services for usability aspects of projects that are single business unit projects or those that cross business units. Projects tend to be large, complex, inter-related and span the organization.
- Consulting with senior management, steering committees and working teams, this position will integrate user centric methodology into the product and services development process and take the overall customer experience to the next level. This incorporates user interface design, layout and harmonization, wire-frames, site-maps, information architecture, personas expertise, usability testing with report findings, prototypes, content templates and style guide interpretation.
- Participate in the development of the e-business strategy as it pertains to customer experience, ensuring alignment with business initiatives.
- Develops holistic usability solutions that integrate products/services, processes and technologies.
- Facilitate effective partnerships and alliances with business units, external providers, vendors, etc.
- Provide education and training on customer experience, usability and user centric design methodology through training sessions, workshops or lunch and learns.
- Promote a learning environment that ensures continued development of a skilled and expert team to enable delivery of quality results.
- Adopts a broad business approach to address stakeholder needs and priorities, in terms of defining and executing customer experience initiatives. This may include requests for enhancements of existing web functions or services.
- Ensures standards and best practices are appropriately communicated and documented into the Style Guide.
- Set up an internal community of web best practices, while maintaining linkage with a similar external community.
Qualifications
Knowledge/Skills/Experience/Competencies:
- Minimum of 7 years experience in advanced customer experience design, ranging from vision and strategy to the creation of the information architecture, navigation and screen design.
- Strategic thinker, strong hands-on leadership skills with the ability to influence and persuade others, especially across organizational boundaries. Well respected by management, peers and direct reports.
- Excellent planning skills. A team player with the ability to manage a portfolio of programs/projects of significant scope and complexity in a fast-paced environment that includes numerous internal and external stakeholders and partners.
- Ability to influence, facilitate, negotiate and manage stakeholders with a variety of sometimes conflicting interests to achieve a cohesive and quality web presence that meets enterprise and individual business area objectives. Includes ability to manage stakeholder expectations to achieve common goals.
- Excellent analytical and problem solving skills, and demonstrated creativity with respect to idea generation and solution implementation. Creative, yet meticulously detail oriented with a sense of craftsmanship.
- Strong interpersonal, presentation, communication and written skills. Will be expected to present to senior management, customers and partners as well as conduct usability testing with customers.
- Collaborator with strong listening, facilitation and persuasion skills.
- High tolerance for change and ambiguity.
- Solid understanding of all facets of e-business development, including related methodologies and object-oriented practices. Proven ability to work with both business and technically oriented e-business teams.
- Good understanding of Group Benefits, Group Retirement Services, Customer Solutions and Individual (products, services, distribution, organization, systems, processes), and a proven track record in partnering across business boundaries would be assets
