Associate Director Service Designer

The Associate Director of Service Design Strategy plays a critical role in Kimberly-Clark Professional’s (KCP) transformation to a customer-centric organization. Partnering with global insights, regional CX Program Mangers as well as cross-functional roles around the globe, the Associate Director of Service Design Strategy is an expert at process mapping, service blueprinting and capability building. You’ll architect SOPs, playbooks and templates to enable ideal post-purchase customer experiences, all while building the organization’s understanding of the importance of customer-centric thinking. The ultimate goals for the Associate Director of Service Design Strategy are to increase customer retention in a quantifiable way by making it easier to do business with Kimberly-Clark Professional and to ensure journey mapping efforts support growth initiatives.

The ideal candidate for this position is a proven leader, potentially from the consulting world, with a high capacity for follow-through. Armed with high emotional intelligence, the Associate Director of Service Design Strategy easily navigates environments where vastly different opinions from powerful stakeholders must be evaluated in order to find an operable middle ground. This person can become an instant expert on disparate parts of the business as new customer insights reveal opportunities to enhance operations – equal parts problem-solving facilitator, advocate for the customer and operational improvement specialist.

Specific Responsibilities Include:

Summary:

• Identify key moments that matter along the customer journey lifecycle base on output and coordination with the Customer Intelligence and Voice of Customer Analytics teams
• Define operational focus areas and bring together cross-functional as well as cross-regional resources to transform critical customer experiences
• Forensically dissect critical experiences, taking account how people, processes, technologies and budgets result in current customer experiences
• Co-create new process design with relevant cross-functional stakeholders, taking into account budgetary and other operational realities
• Influence the roadmap of critical systems and processes based on a need to enhance customer experiences and improve revenue or operating profit
• Build the business case for making critical changes based on desired Service Design outcomes

Journey and Insight Mapping:

• Develops common best practices for customer experience journey maps at KCP
• Partners with KCP researchers and VoC analytics staff to ensure voice of customer, voice of the organization and voice of data fuel a holistic picture of the customer experiences
• Leads regions in developing a consistent process, templates and playbooks for journey mapping, taking into account new ideas as they emerge and providing overall process governance
• Creates common understanding of how people, processes, technologies and resource allocation affects current-state experiences

Operational Service Design:

• Draws from strong process design skills in order to develop future-state customer experiences
• Facilitates input from multiple regions and stakeholders in order to develop future-state models that satisfy a variety of potentially conflicting requirements
• Sets the model for how KCP develops future-state service design plans that include detailed implications for KCP processes, systems or technology changes and potential optimizations for how KCP utilizes human resources to solve problems
• Co-authors relevant standard operating procedures, templates and playbooks for Service Design to be used globally and regionally

Business Case Development and Management:

• Defines and develops a new way for making the “case for change” based on customer insights, journey mapping, key business metrics and operational service design steps above
• Leads a team to turn Service Design recommendations into serious business recommendations backed by estimated costs, benefits, expected resources required and timeline
• Effectively communicates business case to regional and executive KCP leadership in a way that makes customer-centric service design a priority
• Takes the central role in operationalizing the business plan to regional and global stakeholders – helping develop joint project plans and ensuring governance of key initiatives

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree Required (Discipline Open) – MBA Preferred
• Strong Customer Experience background, certification preferred
• 10+ years working in program management, consulting or operational improvement
• Demonstrated experience in developing process maps – experience with Service Blueprinting a must!
• Strong track record of successful project execution
• Ability to understand business objectives and manage stakeholders cross-functionally and globally
• Experience leading teams with diverse backgrounds and disciplines