Halfords

Service Assurance Manager

About us

At Halfords, our mission is to inspire and support a lifetime of motoring and cycling. As a specialist retailer, we lead the market through customer-driven innovation and a distinct product range. We are dedicated to providing our customers with an integrated, unique, and convenient service experience—from e-bike and electric vehicle servicing to on-demand solutions. Our commitment is to foster customer loyalty by offering compelling reasons to keep coming back to our stores, ensuring a lifetime of motoring and cycling enjoyment.

The teams at our Redditch Support Centre work with every other area of our business, putting them at the heart of the action and playing a key role in our success and growth. Everyone brings their individual knowledge and experience to work every day, working as one team to keep things moving smoothly.

If you’re willing to get stuck in, you’ll love it here too. So put yourself at the heart of a dynamic, fast-paced working environment where expertise and focus take people far.

The role

As a Service Assurance Manager you are passionate about delivering an exceptional end-to-end view of service performance and customer experience across IT services. You thrive on developing, implementing and optimising Service Improvement activity to ensure we’re getting the best from our suppliers and partners.

You’ll be proactive and keen to build and maintain key relationships with stakeholders across all Halfords business areas to ensure strategic alignment across all of our IT services, and ensuring change is delivered effectively.   

To you, it’s the opportunity to work as part of a successful and established team, in a role that offers a variety of exciting challenges and enables great personal and professional development pathways where your success is rewarded.

Key responsibilities

• Build excellent relationships with designated customers in the business and stakeholders to align IT Services to strategic objectives
• Create close working relationships with Architects, Product Owners, Infosec, Programme Leads & Group Commercial to deliver reliable, modern and robust services
• Hold regular & robust service performance meetings with aligned associated service providers & perform regular ‘dip tests’ to ensure accuracy of data
• Conduct audits of suppliers & partners to validate reporting and provide measurement of services, benchmarking service where appropriate
• Hold regular Service reviews with stakeholders to demonstrate performance and review service risks and undertake customer satisfaction measurement and improvement
• Define, implement, and govern SLAs for assigned services and ensure delivery of service to agreed levels
• Work with the major incident and problem management teams to ensure next steps are always taken to prevent future MI’s
• Understand business priority, ensure services are aligned to priority and translate and communicate priority throughout IT
• Develop a view of customer experience and service performance and deliver this insight to the Head of Service and Operations
• Proactively identify and deliver service improvement plans (SIPs) required to maintain or improve service levels
• Act as an escalation point for incidents where exceptional business impact is experienced to ensure appropriate resolution
• Maintain a service risk register to manage, mitigate and accept operational risks to service and deliver improvements to mitigate risk
• Be the custodian of live service, approve changes to assigned services to ensure impacts are understood and service performance is not negatively impacted
• Working with the Service Introduction Manager, ensure delivery of new services, including service level requirements, measurement capabilities and agreement with stakeholders and product teams
• Continually improve monitoring and observability for faster rectification of issues.
• Establish, maintain and build out our backup processes, ensuring that we have system recovery in the event of failures
• Build and direct our DR & BCP, ensuring that this is tested regularly across our sites, data centres and cloud
• Embed and improve our network support provision to support our strategic network goals and improve our site recovery time in stores and garages
• Work closely with our architecture and delivery teams to ensure services run in reliable and modern equipment with the appropriate resilience or failsafe processes.
• Ensure that we have appropriate storage to support business demand and future programmes

About you

• Solid technical background and commercial awareness so that the Service Manager can participate in both technical and commercial discussions
• Relationship building skills and the ability to empathise with customers and their needs
• Ability to understand the technology requirements and drivers.
• Experience to conduct meaningful discussions around how IT Services are meeting customer needs
• Proficiency in customer management techniques: The complete sequence of activities required to manage customers' expectations from understanding customer requirements to capturing and delivering a service
• The ability to demonstrate a high level of presentational skills adapting to all levels of audience
• Ability to lead virtual support groups, suppliers and internal & external customers
• Previous involvement with managing third party suppliers
• A Customer obsessed approach to working, making sure our systems and services are working to enable every sale across every area of business (web/garage/store)
• A passion for reporting – being able to take the key messages away from data and presenting to all levels of the organisation
• Drive & ambition, wanting to extract the very best out of suppliers & teams
• Experience implementing improvement plans across a range of business units and services and understands the commercial implications of the work undertaken / improvements required
• Good working knowledge of the key service management processes
• Strong service and continuous improvement ethos

Reward & benefits

• A fair and competitive salary evaluated against market data, annual discretionary bonus scheme, pension, life assurance, 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays and enhanced family leave.
• Commitment and dedication to your ongoing personal and professional development. We help you to own and grow your potential so you can be at your best in your current role and to support your future career aspirations.
• We offer hybrid working with a blend of working in our Support Centre and from home.  
• You will have access to a wealth of employee discounts across the Halfords suite of products and services.
• Wellbeing and inclusion are at the heart of our colleague experience. We offer resources and ongoing support to enhance your wellbeing at work and active Colleague Networks supporting inclusion initiatives across Halfords.

Not sure you meet all the criteria? We'd encourage you to take the wheel and apply anyway! At Halfords we are committed to creating an inclusive workplace for our colleagues. We're an equal opportunities employer and proud to welcome applications from all backgrounds and embrace diversity within our one Halfords Family.

This role operates a hybrid working policy with 2 days on site at our Support Centre in Redditch, Worcestershire.