Senior Manager, Customer Strategy

This is an exciting opportunity to join the world’s largest Building Society. Nationwide has a relationship with at least 1 in 4 households in the UK and is the second largest mortgage lender in the UK. We have a unique opportunity to deliver financial services for the benefit of our members, not shareholders.

This role will play a key part in understanding our customers and their needs in depth, developing our customer strategy and driving cohesion across the society, ensuring that our customers are at the heart of strategic business decisions.

At Nationwide we offer hybrid working wherever possible. More rewarding relationships are supported through our hybrid approach, bringing colleagues together across our UK wide estate, whilst also supporting generous access to home working. We value our time in the office to solve problems, to learn, and to feel connected.

For this job you'll spend at least two days per week, or if part time you'll spend 40% of your working time, based at either London, Swindon or our Northampton office. Whilst these locations are where we are primarily looking to fill the role, if you’re an internal applicant based in a different location we would welcome your application and if successful, your hiring manager will provide further details on how this could work for this specific role. You can also find out more about our approach to hybrid working here.

If we receive a high volume of relevant applications, we may close the advert earlier than the advertised date, so please apply as soon as you can.

What you’ll be doing

You’ll work across the Customer Strategy, Insight & Propositions team and the wider organisation to drive cohesion across strategic decisions that impact our customer base. In particular, you’ll do this through being a critical member of the Customer Strategy team. Leveraging our understanding of customer needs to lead engaging strategic conversations which drive cohesive customer outcomes across Nationwide’s product and channel teams.

We’re looking to recruit a passionate and experienced colleague that will thrive in the following areas;

• Use your own experience as well as external horizon scanning and subject matter expert knowledge to shape and drive towards building a compelling customer strategy, considering how best to deliver maximum impact across Nationwide.
• Take accountability for driving clarity where there may be ambiguity. Success means you bring stakeholders on the journey with you. This is about more than taking a request, it’s about proactively shaping what you think is the right way to focus on ‘customer’ to lead to good outcomes, including identifying where you think there are hot spots worth focusing attention.
• Effectively prioritise key stakeholder needs and strategic questions to ensure a logical approach to shaping customer strategy.
• Creating good visibility of the customer strategy for varied audiences and purposes.
• Building a strong stakeholder network to keep a finger on the pulse and influence Nationwide’s product and channel plans, sharing priorities to co-ordinate outputs and using Society resources efficiently will all be key to success in this role.
• This role reports to the Head of Customer Strategy and means you will be part of the area’s extended leadership team. The role does not entail line management responsibilities; you will need to work as an individual contributor, supporting your teammates and delivering through collaboration. As a senior manager, you will help drive an adult-to-adult culture across the function and team, fostering talented individuals and helping shape big picture thinking about our people agenda.
  
  

About You

You’ll be a self-motivated and organised individual that brings the following experience and abilities;

• Able to pro-actively champion the voice of the customer in stakeholder interactions, ensuring Nationwide strategic decisions have customers at their heart.
• Intuition to step back and look at the bigger picture. There will be ongoing pressure to make decisions in silo that don’t consider customer segments, and you will have the ability to influence to ensure cohesive customer outcomes.
• An ability to deliver under pressure, balancing multiple priorities and stakeholder deliverables that may be quite distinct in nature.
• Be able to demonstrate experience of strategic thinking and setting objectives based on longer time horizons.
• Adept at reaching mutual agreement with challenging stakeholders where there may be competing priorities or views.
• Proven ability to influence at Director level, as well as being recognised as an accessible leader by both peers and your own team.
• Strong curiosity, ability to learn and problem solve at pace are desired attributes for this role.
• Experienced in influencing and shaping strategic initiatives that are customer impacting at scale.
• Knowledgeable in how financial services products and services are developed and delivered, including commercial considerations
  
  

Our Customer First behaviours are all about putting customers and members at the heart of how we work together. You can strengthen your application by showing the behaviours that resonate with you, and how you might have already demonstrated these.

• Say it straight - This is about being honest and direct with good intent and saying what needs to be said in the room. It’s also about being clear, precise, and using language that we and, importantly, our customers and members can understand.
• Push for better - This is about aiming high and constantly looking for better in how we work together and serve our customers and members.
• Get it done - This is about prioritising what will have the greatest impact, being decisive and taking accountability for delivering on the end-to-end outcome.
  
  

We know applying for jobs can sometimes feel like you’re sending an application into a black hole. We review each application individually. So, it’s a good idea to call out your most relevant experience on your application to give yourself the best chance.

The extras you’ll get

There are all sorts of employee benefits available at Nationwide, including:

• A personal pension – if you put in 7% of your salary, we’ll top up by a further 16%
• Up to 2 days of paid volunteering a year
• Life assurance worth 8x your salary
• A great selection of additional benefits through our salary sacrifice scheme
• Wellhub – Access to a range of free and paid options for health and wellness.
• Access to an annual performance related bonus
• Access to training to help you develop and progress your career
• 30 days holiday, pro rata
• Individual healthcare cover
  
  

What makes us different

Nationwide is the world’s largest building society. With over 15 million customers, we have a relationship with almost a quarter of the UK’s population. We’ve got the scale to compete with the big banks, but we’re not a bank.

As a building society, we’re owned by our members – that’s our customers who have their current account, mortgage or savings with us. It means we can do things differently to deliver our Purpose – Banking – but fairer, more rewarding, and for the good of society.

When you work at Nationwide, you can experience that difference for yourself. You’ll be part of a high-performing, purpose-driven organisation that offers rewarding career experiences and a highly competitive range of benefits to match. You’ll also be joining us at an important time as we seek to reach more and more people in the UK. We want everyone in the UK to know that they don’t have to bank with a bank. They can choose a modern mutual instead.

What to do next

If this role is for you, please click the ‘Apply Now’ button. You’ll need to attach your up-to-date CV and answer a few quick questions for us.

We respond to everyone, so we will be in contact shortly after the closing date to let you know the outcome of your application.

Please note that should you be successful in securing this role the job title on our internal systems will be Senior Manager, Member Segments.