Service Desk Manager

Role: Service Delivery Manager (Ref: 197893)

Salary: up to £65k + Benefits

Location: Hybrid - West Midlands

About the role

We are looking for an experienced Service Delivery Manager to take ownership of our clients digital product support operation and help build a scalable, proactive and customer-focused service.

As more of the digital products move from project delivery into live product operations, we are seeking someone experienced with increasing volumes of customer queries, defects, incidents and change requests. We are looking for someone who can bring structure, leadership and technical understanding to this environment and develop the service desk into a high-performing product support function.

This is not a traditional internal IT service desk role. You will be working across customer-facing digital products and enterprise clients, acting as a key link between customers, product teams, delivery teams and technical teams. You will take ownership of the day-to-day service while also developing the strategy and processes required to scale the function as the product portfolio grows.

This is a hands-on role within the Service Desk.

Responsibilities:

• Take overall ownership of the digital product service delivery function, ensuring customers receive a responsive, consistent and high-quality service.
• Lead the transition of products from project implementation into BAU/product operations, ensuring appropriate support processes and ownership are in place.
• Develop and implement a scalable service delivery strategy, processes and ways of working.
• Proactively work with Product, Engineering and Delivery teams to ensure defects, fixes and customer change requests are appropriately prioritised and incorporated into development sprints.
• Act as an escalation point for complex customer, product and service issues.
• Lead and coordinate incident management, including supporting the effective resolution of significant incidents where required.
• Monitor service performance, identify recurring issues and drive continuous improvement.
• Establish appropriate service management processes, reporting and governance.
• Use data and service metrics to identify trends, improve performance and inform decision-making.
• Work closely with enterprise customers and internal stakeholders to understand requirements and ensure effective communication throughout the service lifecycle.
• Help establish clear processes for ticket triage, prioritisation, escalation, resolution and customer communication.
• Identify opportunities to automate, simplify and improve the service as the product portfolio and customer base grows.
• Work with delivery teams to ensure operational readiness is considered throughout the product lifecycle.
• Take ownership of the service management tooling and ensure it is used effectively - experience with Jira Service Management would be highly beneficial.
• Balance strategic improvement activity with being hands-on in the day-to-day running of the service.

What we're looking for

We are looking for someone who combines service delivery leadership with product, customer and technical experience.

Essential experience

• Proven experience in Service Delivery, Product Support, Service Operations or a similar customer-facing technology environment.
• Experience supporting digital products, SaaS platforms or technology solutions.
• Experience working with enterprise customers or clients.
• Strong understanding of service management, including ticket management, prioritisation, escalation and service improvement.
• Experience managing or leading a service/support function and ideally developing or mentoring team members.
• Sufficient technical understanding to engage confidently with Product, Engineering and Delivery teams and understand technical defects, fixes, integrations and issues.
• Experience managing incidents and resolving complex customer or product issues.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the confidence to challenge delivery and product teams where necessary.
• Experience improving processes and establishing more structured and scalable ways of working.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities and context-switch effectively in a fast-moving environment.
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity and taking ownership without needing everything to be clearly defined.
• A proactive approach - someone who identifies problems and opportunities rather than simply waiting for tickets to arrive.

Desirable experience

• Jira Service Management / Jira experience.
• Experience working within a SaaS or software business.
• Experience transitioning products from implementation/project delivery into BAU support.
• Experience building or scaling a product support or service delivery function.
• Experience with major incident management and problem management.
• Experience working within Agile product development environments.
• Experience developing service strategies, operating models or governance frameworks.
• Experience working across Product, Engineering, Development and Customer teams.

The type of person we're looking for:

This role will suit someone who is hands-on, proactive and commercially aware, rather than someone who simply manages a queue of tickets.

You'll need to be comfortable moving between the strategic and operational - developing the longer-term service model one minute and getting into the detail of a complex customer issue the next.

We're looking for someone who:

• Takes ownership and gets things done.
• Is comfortable challenging teams constructively.
• Can build relationships with both customers and technical teams.
• Doesn't get overwhelmed by competing priorities.
• Can make decisions and operate confidently in ambiguity.
• Is technically curious and able to understand enough detail to get to the root of problems.
• Can develop a junior team member while raising the overall capability of the function.
• Is interested in building something better, rather than simply maintaining an existing service.
• Can learn new tools and processes quickly — we're looking for someone who can adapt rather than someone tied to a particular technology or methodology.

Full benefits package available.

For more information contact annabel.hotchkiss@forsythbarnes.com