Head of Customer Engagement at Watervale Investments

About the Position

Our company has quickly grown from its founding in 2014 to serving hundreds of furniture material retailers across Kenya.

The Head of Customer Engagement will take the reins of customer management responsibilities ensuring the day to day running of these functions while driving the expansion of the company breaking into strategic areas.

The ideal Head of Customer Engagement will have a self-starter attitude and be an excellent strategy person who can make sure that the day-to-day operations are in line with medium-term and long-term goals.

They will have an outstanding analytical and judgement ability to identify trends and weigh the evidence in order to decide on the best course of action. They will be effective people manager, eager to grow their team and develop the individuals which comprise it.

The Head of Customer Engagement will report to the Director and directly and indirectly lead a team of 8 people, including others with management responsibilities.

Develop and lead a high performing customer engagement team

• Invest in coaching and development of your team, taking advantage of opportunities to grow team members’ responsibilities
• Maintain a high-performance culture, designing a motivating compensation policy and rewarding outstanding accomplishment
• Hire and coach new talents into the customer engagement team as required by the expansion strategy

Manage the company’s portfolio and bring forward the company’s expansion strategy

• Oversee and coordinate all the prospecting and customers’ management functions ensuring that they are performed with the highest efficiency
• Create an effective system to ensure that the team collects account receivables on time
• Work with management to design and implement ideas and strategies to launch a new category of mattress, acquire new customers and break into new markets
• Propose and lead the implementation of out-of-the-box marketing ideas to drive increased market penetration of existing products lines
• Directly manage the relationship with key accounts in the portfolio guaranteeing high level of satisfaction and increased sales volumes

Implement and manage systems to effectively track activities and sales

• Find opportunities to develop and improve systems, delegate responsibilities to enable the team to handle more work with increasing complexity
• Coordinate activities with the operation and production teams ensuring smooth collaboration with the customer engagement team and improve processes based on customers’ and other teams’ feedback
• Create and enforce a data-driven decision-making culture
• Effectively utilize customer relationship management (CRM) and sales tracking platforms to ensure that the customer engagement team operates efficiently and meets its targets
• Introduce key control points, allowing you to maintain quality and accuracy of the growing activities within your area of responsibility while delegating more responsibilities to the team

Manage our products portfolio and ensure an efficient use of resources

• Regularly update products weekly consumption – keeping in mind previous stock out, seasonality and market trends – to ensure that an optimal level of inventory is held
• Liaise with supply chain to ensure timely reordering
• Conduct market research and offer recommendations about new products and/or designs to resources and introduce in the market
• Closely monitor market trends and competitive landscape to define pricing strategy for each product category

Qualifications

• You are an out-of-the-box thinker and enjoy coming up with creative ideas
• You are a strong leader, and you have at least 3 years’ experience managing individuals across different functional areas. You have a proven track record of motivating and developing your direct reports.
• You preferably have at least 2 years’ experience in leading a company’s business development strategy and a track record of achievement in growing a company’s portfolio
• You have the ability to manage key customers’ relationships in another organization and are effective at building, maintaining and growing such relationships independently.
• You have an entrepreneurial streak and have drawn energy from working in a young company, start-up environment or other environment of rapid growth and change. You enjoy working on multiple diverse projects and tasks simultaneously.
• You thrive when you are able to take initiative, you are considered very self-managing and do best in an environment where you are given high-level goals and take initiative to achieve them.
• You are confident in your own ability to perform and inspire others to perform, and you are eager to take on responsibility for a key team within our company. You find the prospect of being rewarded according to your ability to grow a team extremely motivating.
• You have experience developing and implementing management systems within an organization, and value the structure and predictability they bring.
• You possess a strong analytical toolkit, and you frequently apply quantitative analysis to decision-making. You can troubleshoot complex problems and offer ideas about possible solutions