Contact Centre (Systems and Team Operations)

Lifestyle Communities; Melbourne; On-site; AUD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Professional development

Collaborative environment

Long weekends

Lifestyle hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Lifestyle Communities is seeking an experienced Contact Centre Manager in Melbourne to lead a team delivering empathetic, high‑quality customer interactions. You will shape the automation and AI strategy, manage recruitment and performance, and drive a single operating model across channels.

Bring 5+ years leading contact centres, strong experience with AI in service, and a track record in change management.

Qualifications

• Five or more years leading a contact centre or customer ops team.
• Experience deploying or operating AI in a service environment (conversational agents/agent assist).
• Strong command of contact centre performance: forecasting, capacity planning, SLA, cost to serve.
• Fluency with CRM and contact centre platforms and data.
• Analytical judgement and ability to explain findings to executives.
• Proven track record leading teams through significant change with honesty.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and grow the team, building a high-performing culture focused on automation.
• Coach with conversation intelligence and provide concrete development examples.
• Own recruitment, onboarding, performance management and succession for the contact centre.
• Run a unified operating model with shared queue, standards and performance view.
• Define AI agent roles and handover points, ensuring privacy and compliance.
• Maintain a quality framework applying to human and automated interactions.
• Brief senior leaders on root causes and frontline insights for decisions.

Skills

People leadership

AI in service env

Forecasting

Quality frameworks

Analytical judgement

Clear communication

Customer-centric mindset

Tools

CRM platforms

AI agents / conversation intel

Contact centre platforms

Job description

About us

Lifestyle Communities is a leading provider of affordable, inclusive and vibrant independent living communities across Victoria. Our mission is to enrich the lives of our homeowners by fostering a sense of belonging, independence and wellbeing. With a focus on community, connection and an active lifestyle, we are committed to creating exceptional experiences for our homeowners.

About the role

We’re looking for an inspiring Contact Centre Manager to lead the team at the heart of our customer experience—and shape the systems, automation and AI that power it. As the front door to our communities, every phone call, web enquiry, email, chat and social message is an opportunity to make a meaningful connection. Our customers are navigating a significant, life-changing and often emotional decision to downsize, and your team will be there to guide them with empathy, confidence and care. You’ll own the contact centre capability end to end-from developing the people and AI agents working side by side to optimising the technology, processes and performance that bring it all together.

This is a role for a leader who will collaborate with peers, coach and mentor our teams, drive operational excellence, and have a creative curiosity that will help us reimagine the future while never losing sight of our customer as the only truth.

As the Contact Centre Manager, my days will involve;

• Lead, coach and grow the team, building a high-performing culture that is curious about automation.
• Use conversation intelligence to coach the team bringing specific examples to every development conversation.
• Own recruitment, onboarding, performance management and succession for the team for the contact centre, partnering with People Experience. In line with AI taking on more routine work, support the team’s development toward managing complex, higher-empathy and high-value conversations and giving them the training required to succeed there.
• Run a single operating model in which our team and the systems that support them (including AI agents) share one queue, one set of service standards and one view of performance.
• Determine how work is divided: which contacts AI resolves end to end, which it prepares for a team member, and which are led by the team from the outset.
• Own the channel's service performance: answer and response times, first contact resolution, abandonment, quality, customer satisfaction and cost to serve.
• Manage day to day operations and the ongoing roster.
• Define the job each AI agent does: the intents it covers, the tone it uses, the actions it is permitted to take and the point at which it must stop and hand over.
• Maintain a quality framework that holds human and automated interactions to the same standard, with human review over a meaningful sample of automated conversations.
• Ensure automated conversations meet privacy, disclosure, consent and record-keeping obligations, and that customers can always reach a person.
• Turn conversation data, survey themes and complaint patterns into a clear account of what customers are struggling with, and take it to the teams who can fix the cause rather than the symptom.
• Brief senior leaders on root causes, not just scores, and represent the frontline view in decisions about product, pricing, process and campaign design.
• Run a visible improvement backlog for the channel and report progress against it.

Experience

• Five or more years leading a contact centre, customer service or customer operations team.
• Demonstrated experience deploying, configuring or operating AI in a service environment - conversational agents, automated quality scoring, agent assist, predictive workforce management or conversation intelligence. We are interested in what you configured and calibrated, not what you bought.
• Strong command of contact centre performance: forecasting, capacity planning, service level management, quality frameworks and cost to serve.
• Fluency with CRM and contact centre platforms and confidence working with the data they produce.
• Analytical judgement: the ability to move from a dashboard to a root cause to a decision, and to explain that chain to an executive audience.
• A track record of leading teams through significant change with honesty, and of retaining good people while doing it.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to write clearly enough that an AI agent can be trained on your standards.

What you need to be successful in the role

• You are an experienced people leader with a strong track record of building, coaching and developing high-performing teams.
• You are excited by what automation can achieve and confident contributing to the design and governance of an AI-augmented operating model—not simply using the tools provided.
• You understand that technology and human connection work hand in hand, and that customers making one of the biggest decisions of their later life deserve empathy, reassurance and access to a person when it matters.
• You bring practical curiosity: you are willing to test new ideas, measure the results honestly and change course when something does not work.
• You are comfortable taking accountability for the performance of systems you did not build and rigorous in checking their outputs.
• You can turn frontline insights into a clear, compelling story that helps senior leaders make better decisions.
• You have a genuine customer service ethos and a strong commercial mindset, balancing exceptional experiences with sound operational decision-making.
• You are an excellent communicator who can build trusted relationships across all levels of the business, from your team to the executive group.
• You hold a current full driver’s licence and are comfortable travelling to communities if required.

What we offer

• Ongoing professional development and training opportunities
• A collaborative and supportive work environment
• Lifestyle Long Weekends
• Lifestyle Hours
• Generous Paid Parental Leave
• Be part of a workplace that values curiosity, innovation, collaboration, and people excellence!