Lead Service Designer

Irwin Mitchell; Birmingham; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading UK law firm seeks a Lead Service Designer to enhance client experiences and streamline service delivery. The role involves leading research, workshops, and design efforts focused on improving customer journeys. Ideal candidates will have extensive expertise in service design, strong communication skills, and a passion for customer advocacy. The position offers a 6-month fixed-term contract with a range of benefits including 25 days of standard holidays and a generous pension scheme.

Benefits

25 days holidays plus bank holidays

Flexible pension schemes

Volunteering days

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in service design or customer journey design.
• Customer-centric mindset.
• Ability to simplify complex information.
• Experience in facilitating workshops.

Responsibilities

• Lead internal conversations and workshops.
• Stay up to date with industry trends.
• Create concepts and proposals for improvements.
• Plan and facilitate diverse groups towards common goals.

Skills

Service design expertise

Customer journey mapping

Excellent communication

Data analysis

Design thinking methodology

Tools

MS Excel

PowerPoint

Journey mapping software

Job description

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As the subject matter expert and lead of client service design for the firm, you’ll be responsible for utilising insight and research to improve and develop client journeys and experiences. Working closely with a diverse range of colleagues across Client Experience and Insight, Business Performance, Marketing and Change, you’ll focus on bringing friction points and opportunities to life, providing tangible solutions to drive improvement, embedding a personalised experience, which increases recommendation, word of mouth, and reputation.

As a lead service designer, you’ll balance strategic thinking with hands-on design work, ensuring that services meet client needs effectively.

What You’ll Be Doing

Client Experience:

• Lead internal conversations, workshops, and research activities to help evaluate and improve services and experiences across IM. Undertake activities to understand, co-create, and map customer journeys and services from end to end, highlighting key touchpoints, pain points, customer needs, and opportunities to add value where it matters to our customers.
• Stay up to date with industry and market trends to continuously improve our offer and stay ahead. Utilise operational, brand, and customer KPIs; as well as customer and market insight and feedback to understand how our customers feel about our legal service delivery and manage a roadmap of customer-focused opportunities.
• Create concepts, proposals, and plans for client improvements or services and create service blueprints, bringing the vision and challenges to life, enabling delivery teams to quickly implement client-led changes. Consider client needs, business goals, and technical constraints while shaping these concepts.
• Translate high-level ideas into actionable improvement opportunities, working with finance, business performance, and practice operations to further develop and refine the concept to meet both business and client needs.
• Lead the design on multiple projects running in tandem, with the ability to work alone or in collaboration with others.
• Continuously assess existing services for improvement opportunities. Use data, client feedback, and analytics to identify areas for enhancement and propose and implement changes that enhance usability, efficiency, and overall satisfaction.
• Validate improvements using real client feedback and iterate improvements ensuring any change is embedded and fit for purpose and provide advice and recommended approaches to organisational challenges, bringing to life the impact on the clients journey.
• Plan and facilitate groups including legal teams, support services, senior business area leads, and central services towards a common goal and be the voice of the client in the room.
• Utilise segmentation and personas to ensure various clients' feedback and opinions are considered when journeys or services are evaluated.
• Lead the development and utilisation of core customer-centric thinking, tools, and techniques.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; the ability to articulate insights in a simple and engaging way which drives action.

Subject Matter Expert (SME):

• Champion the voice of the customer consistently, identifying opportunities to maximise customer value, productivity, efficiency, and service delivery.
• Be an expert in Design thinking methodology and customer journey mapping and improvement implementation.
• Customer Advocacy and Culture Champion: Embody the voice of the customer within the organisation, championing their needs and fostering a client-led culture across all IM teams.
• Drive and initiate customer-focused changes, ensuring that decisions, projects, processes, and key performance indicators are customer-centric led.
• Be the point of reference across the wider business for end-to-end knowledge of all IM client journeys.
• Competitive Awareness: Stay informed about our competitors’ customer experience offerings. Identify opportunities where we can distinguish ourselves and enhance our own services.

About You

• Extensive experience in service design or customer journey design, with a good track record of designing new processes and experiences and delivering customer-focused improvements within a large-scale service delivery business.
• Customer-centric mindset, able to credibly operate as the voice of the customer within business discussions and projects.
• Ability to simplify complex, cross-departmental information and processes, enabling improvement opportunities to be found.
• Previous experience of Design Thinking methodology and journey mapping.
• Able to credibly operate as the voice of the customer within business discussions and projects.
• High-quality verbal and written presentation skills to articulate the concept of design or service improvements.
• Excellent communication and facilitation skills, with experience in facilitating senior face-to-face workshops.
• Experience of working with complex data, research, and insight – surfacing key areas of improvement.
• Excellent MS Excel and PowerPoint skills and experience of journey mapping software.
• Resilient and change-focused – will have a track record of delivering step-change customer improvements, as well as incremental improvements within a large service delivery business.
• Drive and ambition to improve customer processes and services, able to work independently and in an agile approach.
• Inquisitive mindset and the ability to look beyond the norm and find new ways of working.
• Excellent communicator, with high levels of emotional intelligence and empathy.
• Exceptional planning qualities; a passion for organising and delivering projects while inspiring cross-functional teams with differing roles, levels of experience, and areas of focus.
• Can bring new ideas for enhancing and expanding our existing activities.
• The ability to easily establish trust-based relationships with multiple stakeholders and gain valuable insights and ideas for improvement through collaboration and communication.
• Drive and tenacity; enjoys a challenge, proven ability to adapt and remove obstacles to achieve results, determination, and optimism.

This role is a 6-month fixed-term contract

Our Benefits - What We Can Offer You

• 25 days holidays as standard plus bank holidays - You can ‘buy’ up to 35 hours of extra holiday too.
• Generous and flexible pension schemes.
• Volunteering days – Two days of volunteering every year for a cause of your choice (fully paid).
• Westfield Health membership, offering refunds on medical services alongside our Aviva Digital GP services.

We also offer a wide range of well-being initiatives to encourage positive mental health both in and out of the workplace and to make sure you’re fully supported. This includes our Flexible by Choice programme which gives our colleagues more choice over a hybrid way of working subject to role, team, and client requirements.

We have been ranked in the Best Workplaces for Wellbeing for Large Organisations for 2024!

Our responsible business programmes are fundamental to who we are and our purpose. We’re committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace where our colleagues can flourish, and we have established a number of inclusion network groups across our business to support this aim.

Our commitment to Social Responsibility, community investment activity, and tackling climate change is a fundamental part of who we are. It’s made up of four strands: Our People, Our Community, Our Environment, and Our Pro Bono.