Product Experience Lead at Ernst & Young Global Limited (EY)

Business Unit &Team: Product Team

Location: Cape Town, South Africa Job Rank: Associate Director
Job Summary:

The Product Experience Lead ensures our ability to deliver a market leading customer experience. The role combines the disciplines of customer support and user experience design with a strong underlying emphasis on a data-driven approach to product management.

Essential Functions of the Job:  

• Manage a global product support team
• Lead and manage a global team of product support specialists, including a dispersed network of specialists from a range of business units outside of EY Catalyst.
• Proactively execute collaborative and cross-functional solutions to product-related issues.
• Build the capability of the support team to solve increasingly complex issues.
• Identify and eliminate root cause barriers to issue resolution accuracy and quality.
• Oversee the quality of the team’s work, provide coaching and training
• Design and manage work processes to constantly improve service trends and reduce waste and rework.
• Manage product feedback
• Set up and monitor analytics and reporting across feedback channels.
• Work closely with the Portfolio Analyst to identify opportunities for product improvements that will reduce the support burden and improve customer experience.
• Act as the key liaison between the product team and client enablement team, providing two-way feedback and maintaining positive and productive relationships.
• Ensure that product feedback is sufficiently detailed and correctly channelled to Product Owners.
• Bring innovative approaches to user support and product adoption
• Own the playbook that maps the customer/product journey and details product support strategies for each stage of the customer lifecycle.
• Actively engage in new product launches by collaborating with various technical and non-technical teams to ensure a seamless product support experience.
• Actively contribute to the product development strategy.
• Drive the self-service support strategy.
• Use data to design and implement proactive support interventions that make use of machine learning and AI capabilities of our supporting technologies.
• Research user behaviours and turn these into insights for proactive support strategies. 
• Manage product Service Level Agreements and escalations
• Ensure that product service level agreements (SLAs) are met; report on SLA adherence.
• Manage incident management and escalation processes; drive resolutions and positive customer experiences.
• Build productive working relationships across various EY entities to collaboratively solve Product issues. 
• Analytical/Decision Making Responsibilities: 
• Manage complex relationships internally and externally.
• Exercise negotiation skills to navigate complex client needs with an established product roadmap to support mutually beneficial solutions.
• Manage a budget.

Desired Skills and Experience
Knowledge and Skills Requirements: 

• Exceptional communication skills to build and maintain relationships with clients and colleagues across a number of roles and disciplines.
• Overcome barriers to collaboration, communication and process effectiveness to ensure teams can work effectively across departments to deliver exception client service.
• Highly effective investigative, critical, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
• Formal knowledge of and working experience with industry-leading customer experience practices and frameworks.
• Working practical knowledge of user experience design principles.
• Experience with customer support/ticketing systems.
• High level of project management competence.

Supervision Responsibilities:  

• Management of a global product support team.
• Cross-functional oversight of resources outside of the Catalyst team, who contribute to our customer support deliverables.

Other Requirements:

• The incumbent must be proactive, disciplined and self-managed to be successful in a predominantly remote team.

Job Requirements:

• A minimum of 10 years of working experience in account management, client management, user experience management or similar roles.
• A tertiary education or equivalent work experience.