CX Lead
About The Role
Your role is to define and build the ultimate John Lewis experience for our customers and drive loyalty and advocacy amongst our target customers. You will play a critical role in defining the customer experience for John Lewis across the end to end customer journey both in-store and online ensuring desired levels of brand salience, customer satisfaction and business outcomes. You will ensure customer experience is a core differentiator for the JL retail brand.
You will lead the team of customer experience experts to define the CX strategy and the understanding of the pain points and opportunities today, prioritising and making improvements to the customer experience in channels by designing and leading cross-functional, collaborative squads to design and test end-to-end customer solutions. You will influence leaders across the business, including omni and retail, to ensure the CX strategy is delivered in their channels.
• Expected salary - Up to £100,000 depending on experience.
• Contract type - This position is a Secondment/Fixed Term contract until May 2026
• Working pattern/flexible working - The Partnership has adopted a hybrid working approach, meaning you'll be able to work a mixture between the office and home based upon your personal needs whilst balancing the needs of the business. The Customer Experience team aims for between 1- 3 days a week in the office to connect and on a more ad-hoc basis to attend key meetings.
• Location - This role is based at our Bracknell Head Office.
Key responsibilities
• Lead the constant refinement to existing customer experience strategy, prioritising resources to ensure improvements are delivered
• Provide subject matter expertise in the delivery and management of customer experience across the business, to ensure that new propositions, developments or partner service changes are optimised from the customer’s point of view
• You will identify the customer need/opportunity through data and insight and lead the development of options with cross functional stakeholders to recommend improvements that align with our Brand and Customer Strategy, identified outcomes and our John Lewis Partnership Plan.
• You will influence and engage cross-functional leaders to ensure delivery of the CX strategy recommendations. Where required, you will work with channel owners to develop the business case for Partner resources and investment, recommending clear and budgeted actions for review by the relevant governance group.
• Lead the development of customer improvements through your sound knowledge of CX design principles, customer journey mapping, agile working and stakeholder management. Use your knowledge of the business to drive collaboration between cross functional stakeholders, resolve challenges and drive the best outcome for our customers. Role model a focus on the customer in your cross functional squads and increase the effectiveness of the CX profession.
• Deliver clear, concise and effective communication and presentations to senior stakeholders across the business. Use your interpersonal skills to establish productive and healthy relationships with stakeholders and peers in Customer, Trading, Retail and Strategy. Provide clear and actionable briefs to other professions where necessary.
• Maintain a focus on the needs of our target customers by regularly reviewing competitors, meeting with customers and contributing to the ongoing review of existing propositions and touchpoints. Maintain a knowledge of John Lewis channels, touchpoints and strategic areas to ensure you can adapt and flex to the changing needs of our customers.
Essential skills/experience you’ll need
• CX strategy development and deployment
• Customer experience and service design for major new propositions and brands
• Experienced in design thinking, agile projects, lean startup 'test and learn' experimentation
• Demonstrable experience of influencing stakeholders up to board level and in a range of business contexts
• Good understanding of strategic and analytical tools and techniques
• Proven ability to coach and develop high calibre strategy managers
Desirable skills/experience you may have
• Qualifications or professional experience of behavioural psychology, marketing or digital design
• Experience making effective data informed decisions, supported by the use of data visualisation tools such as Tableau
• Experience in customer service or customer care
About The Partnership
We’re the largest employee owned business in the UK and home of our cherished brands, John Lewis and Waitrose. We’re not just employees, we’re Partners, driven by our purpose to build a happier world. As we look to our future, there’s never been a more exciting time to join us.
We’re ruthlessly focused on being brilliant at retail. We continue to innovate, adapt and diversify. Never Knowingly Undersold on price, quality and service in John Lewis and passionately serving food-lovers in Waitrose.
As Partners we all share the responsibility of ownership and in its rewards. We use our voices to contribute to our success, working together through the good and challenging times, holding true to our behaviours and treating everyone with kindness and respect.
We all own making the Partnership somewhere we belong. Embracing our differences and creating an environment where we’re free to be ourselves and can THRIVE. Growing ourselves individually, and as a collective.
As Partners, we make all the difference. And, we all own it.
Important points to note:
It’s important to note that some of our roles are subject to pre-employment vetting (which may include DBS checks for successful candidates). If required, you’ll be informed and provided with information about vetting during the recruitment process and we encourage you to complete any vetting documents quickly to avoid delays. Any DBS checks required will be carried out by a third-party registered body and financial probity checks may also be required for some of our roles.
We also recommend that you apply as soon as possible as vacancies can close early if we see a high number of applicants.
We want all of our Partners to have a good work-life balance and we support flexible working. This might mean flexible or compressed hours, job sharing or shorter hour contracts, where possible. Please discuss this further with the hiring manager during your interview.