Training & Quality Manager

Position: Full Time

Location: London

Salary: Band 3 £34,689 – £48,576  Salary negotiable depending on experience within the green zone

What we value at Westminster

Westminster City Council believes in creating a City for All where people are born into a supportive and safe environment, grow and learn throughout their lives, build fantastic careers in world-leading industries, have access to high quality, affordable homes and retire into the community with dignity and pride.

We work together to adapt to the changing needs of our communities – resulting in a dynamic atmosphere where ambition, diversity and creativity are celebrated.

Our culture

At Westminster we have a culture of openness, transparency and integrity – where everyone has the opportunity to thrive and develop to be the very best.
The Westminster Way is the council’s commitment to our staff and is underpinned by three pillars:

• Personal development: Everyone has talent.
  We want everyone to thrive at Westminster and so we take the time to nurture talent – coaching and mentoring our people to be the very best.
• Value our people and diversity: Everyone is valued.
  We embrace our differences, to bring new perspectives to the future challenges of our city.
• The Westminster Way of working: Everyone is a leader.
  At Westminster we encourage everyone to develop themselves to have a growth mindset and an outward looking approach to provide the best service to our residents, businesses and visitors. We champion modern and agile working and an open and transparent outlook to the way we work.

In order to do the very best for our communities, we believe that our workforce should be representative of the people we work on behalf of, our residents. That’s why at Westminster we celebrate and embrace our differences.

We are passionate about creating a workplace where all can thrive, and where every single person has the opportunity to develop, grow and to be valued for their contribution.

Responsibilities of this role

Westminster’s corporate contact centre is a key access point for customers. The vision for the service is to ensure all channels are effective and designed to meet the needs of our customers helping to transform the way they interact with us and making it easy for them to find the information and services they need to improve their lives. The post holder will be the lead for Training & Quality across the corporate contact centre

Job Responsibilities:
All roles within the contact centre are focused on 4 key themes: Customer Service, Channel Shift, Continuous Improvement and Performance. This role will also have a specific responsibility for training.

Customer Service

• Understand the skills and knowledge requirements for delivery of excellent customer service in line with the Council’s Customer Experience and Digital Strategy.
• Design, develop and deliver a comprehensive learning and development programme for the corporate contact centre, with a specific focus on providing advisers with the skills and tools they need to improve customers’ experience of contacting the Council
• Proactively and routinely assess performance against the agreed Westminster standard, undertake skills gap analysis and use feedback from customers to identify areas for improvement and ensure these are built into the learning and development programme

Channel Shift

• Support the delivery of the councils City for All objectives & Customer Engagement & Digital Strategy
• Work as part of the Contact Centre Management team to help Identify opportunities for channel shift and establish and design training requirements as appropriate

Continuous Improvement

• Identify, design and deliver training, guidance and ongoing development and support for new processes and technologies that may be introduced into the contact centre to ensure high levels of uptake and impact
• Interpret and manipulate customer data to create and present evidence-based insight and recommendations for learning opportunities and process improvements
• Assess the impact of the learning and development programme and adapt and revise it as necessary
• Take ownership for delivering a coaching culture across the contact centre including, assessing Customer Service Advisor performance, monitoring the quality and volumes of Team Manager coaching, identifying learning and development actions and needs and producing regular quality monitoring reports.

Performance

• Lead on the induction of new starters, ensuring their skill sets and development needs are captured, and a comprehensive training plan is developed and delivered
• Support staff during their probationary period through coaching, training needs assessment and quality assessment.
• Work flexibly to ensure learning and development is adaptable to changing needs and can be delivered across shift patterns and peaks and troughs in customer demand.
• Ensure the provision of refresher training is included in the training plan and delivered in a timely manner
• Manage contact centre performance indicators and service level reporting, ensuring that information can be presented in a variety of ways to a range of stakeholders including Elected Members
• Inspire and support a team towards the achievement of team and individual targets and support succession planning.

Training

Determining and assessing the contact centre’s training and employee development needs

• Creating training materials and programmes to address specific business objectives
• Working with staff, and the department leadership to ensure the achievement of training objectives
• Developing measurable outcomes and building these into staff development plans
• Monitoring and assessing the effectiveness and success of training programmes, via suitable management reporting that demonstrate individual, team and centre learning
• Managing training budgets
• Keeping up-to-date on the latest training trends, developments and best practices
• Identifying and implementing a wide range of training techniques to improve efficiency and returns on investment, including online and blended learning solutions
• Managing employee enrolment for training, schedule training sessions and organising the resources to facilitate training programmes.

Budget: Responsibilities Circa £200,000 training and system budgets
Staffing: None
Procurement: Circa £100,000
Other: None

What do we expect this role to achieve?

The Training and Quality Manager will be responsible for determining what skills and knowledge contact centre agents need in order to deliver the ambition set out within the Council’s Customer Experience and Digital Strategy.

Design and deliver a comprehensive, rolling learning and development programme that equips agents with the skills to deliver an excellent customer experience. This will involve training needs analysis, skills gap analysis and then development of a programme of training, development and ongoing coaching and support that ensures the service continuously improves in response to customer feedback

Experience Essential Experience

• A least 3 years’ experience of successfully designing, planning, preparing and delivering training in systems, processes and soft skills in a customer service, contact centre environment
  Expert knowledge in a range of training techniques and tools.
  Detailed knowledge of training design, creation, delivery and evaluation of training courses along with the ability to plan and schedule training sessions
  Extensive experience in the design and delivery of engaging self-service training content using a number of digital/online/e-learning platforms
  Ability to manage a diverse and demanding workload and be able to adjust to multiple and shifting priorities

Desirable Experience

• Proven ability to understand technical solutions to build appropriate and effective training experiences and materials
• Working knowledge of e-learning development tools (e.g. Adobe Captivate, Articulate).
• Up to date knowledge of strategic developments in contact centre delivery
  Skills
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, able to present complex information in a clear and structured way to a range of audiences.
• Excellent analytical skills, able to proactively identify areas of best practice (and promote them) and underperformance (and address them)
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to distil complex concepts for the easy consumption of different audiences including delivering effective training sessions as necessary
• Ability to ensure continuous improvement of training approach – using skills to design effective training feedback methods and using feedback to inform continuous improvement of training.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to adopt an appropriate tone and approach when dealing with stakeholders across the organisation
• Proven ability to think strategically and be able to progress ideas and concepts to realisation
• Ability to prioritise own workload and that of a large team to meet deadlines in a fast changing environment
• Highly motivated and proactive with a positive attitude towards change. High level of flexibility and adaptability.

Corporate standards

• Values and behaviours
  Our values and behaviours are at the heart of everything we do. We expect you to work in this Westminster Way empowering, engaging and encouraging your teammates to deliver our corporate vision.
• Compliance
  We expect you to ensure legal, regulatory and policy compliance in area of your specialism, identifying opportunities and risks and escalate/report where appropriate.
• Equality and diversity
  We value equality and diversity as a city council and we want you to support and promote this in your day-to-day work.
• Resources / Financial management
  We expect you to manage delegated budgets, funding and resources in line with our processes and our Westminster Way

Additional values and behaviours for Managers People and Service Management

• Role model the Westminster Way:
  o Demonstrate inclusive leadership
  o Take the lead in driving initiatives
  o Be proactive in being forward and outward looking, by regularly investing in own development.
• Driving forward performance by empowering staff to take the lead. Setting high standards, encouraging improvement and innovation. Supporting the team to achieve by adopting a coaching style of management
• Having regular employee led conversations to develop our people – creating a safe environment for learning, taking time to understand their strengths and motivations, stretching them and coaching them to achieve.
• Managing budgets responsibly – planning, monitoring and adapting budgets to respond to changing priorities.
• Delivering the Medium Term Plan
• Working within the democratic framework – understanding the democratic process and its role in public organisations, anticipating Member needs and responding to their feedback.