Head of Voice of Customer (VoC) & Customer Insights:

Function: Enterprise Customer Experience, Research & Insights

Role Scope: Enterprise-wide

Business Coverage: Personal Wealth and Workplace Solutions

Experience: Senior leadership experience in enterprise VoC, Customer Experience (CX), Customer Insights, Research, and Analytics

1. Role Overview:

The Head of Voice of Customer (VoC) & Customer Insights will lead the design, implementation, and scaling of an enterprise-wide Voice of Customer capability across Personal Wealth and Workplace businesses.

The role will establish an integrated, insight-driven approach to understanding customer needs, expectations, behaviours, experiences, and business outcomes across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C customer ecosystems. The leader will combine advanced research methodologies, analytical expertise, technology-enabled listening, and enterprise change leadership to translate customer feedback and behavioural insights into measurable business improvements.

The mandate extends beyond survey programs and reporting dashboards. The successful candidate will build a comprehensive customer intelligence capability that influences business strategy, product development, service delivery, customer communications, operational effectiveness, and investment decisions.

This leader will work closely with senior executives and cross-functional stakeholders to embed customer-centric decision-making across the enterprise, while building and developing a high-performing team of researchers, analysts, and VoC program leaders.

2. Key Responsibilities:

A. Enterprise VoC Strategy and Leadership:

- Develop and execute a multiyear enterprise VoC and Customer Insights strategy aligned with business priorities and customer experience objectives.

- Establish a comprehensive listening framework covering relationship feedback, transactional experiences, digital interactions, service journeys, and customer lifecycle events.

- Develop an annual research agenda and a phased roadmap for implementing and scaling VoC capabilities across business units.

- Integrate the perspectives of employers, plan sponsors, intermediaries, participants, individual wealth clients, and other relevant customer groups.

- Establish common enterprise standards while accommodating the distinct needs and priorities of different business units and customer segments.

B. VoC Program Implementation and Transformation:

- Lead the end-to-end implementation and modernization of enterprise VoC programs, including current-state assessment, business case development, platform evaluation, vendor selection, data integration, pilot programs, rollout, and adoption.

- Own the VoC operating model, program governance, budget, delivery roadmap, vendor performance, and continuous improvement.

- Partner with Product, Data, Technology, Operations, Risk, Finance, and business leadership teams to establish sustainable processes and reliable data flows.

- Define roles, responsibilities, governance mechanisms, and performance measures across enterprise and business-unit teams.

- Drive adoption of VoC tools, processes, and insights across the organization.

C. Research Design and Measurement Excellence:

- Provide strategic and methodological leadership across quantitative and qualitative research programs, including survey design, sampling, questionnaire development, testing, fieldwork, and analysis.

- Establish robust measurement frameworks for Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), and other relevant customer experience indicators.

- Distinguish relationship-level measures from transactional and journey-specific feedback.

- Ensure research quality through appropriate sample design, response-rate analysis, bias assessment, weighting, statistical validation, and trend comparability.

- Establish consistent measurement standards while ensuring that comparisons across business units, customer populations, and time periods are methodologically sound.

D. Integrated Customer Intelligence and Advanced Analytics:

- Build a holistic view of the customer by integrating survey feedback with complaints, contact-centre interactions, CRM data, relationship-manager feedback, digital behaviour, service requests, transactions, operational metrics, and business outcomes.

- Incorporate customer interviews, journey research, and frontline employee insights to develop a deeper understanding of customer needs and pain points.

- Partner with data and technology teams to establish appropriate data integration, governance, lineage, access controls, and privacy safeguards.

- Leverage text analytics, AI, and emerging technologies to identify themes, emerging issues, sentiment patterns, and opportunities for service improvement.

- Ensure that AI-generated or inferred insights are appropriately validated and clearly distinguished from directly observed customer feedback.

E. Insight Generation and Root-Cause Analysis:

- Lead customer segmentation, cohort and trend analysis, qualitative synthesis, driver analysis, and root-cause investigations.

- Identify the underlying factors influencing customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, engagement, and service outcomes.

- Translate broad customer feedback into specific, actionable improvements across customer journeys, digital platforms, service interactions, and business processes.

- Apply evidence-based prioritisation using customer impact, business value, severity, reach, cost, and implementation feasibility.

- Use appropriate experiments and evaluation methodologies to measure the effectiveness of customer experience interventions.

- Communicate findings with clarity, including the strength of evidence, limitations, uncertainty, and distinction between correlation and causation.

F. Executive Engagement and Benchmarking:

- Build executive understanding of customer experience metrics, research methodologies, external benchmarks, and their implications for business decisions.

- Present insights and recommendations to senior leadership, translating complex research and analytics into clear strategic and operational priorities.

- Identify appropriate industry benchmarks and evaluate the comparability of populations, methodologies, customer journeys, channels, and measurement standards.

- Partner with Finance and business leaders to assess relationships between customer experience and measurable outcomes, including retention, growth, engagement, and cost to serve.

- Support investment decisions by demonstrating the potential customer and business benefits of proposed initiatives without relying on unsupported assumptions about financial returns.

G. Customer-Centric Action and Business Impact:

- Establish a structured framework for converting customer insights into accountable business actions.

- Create and maintain a prioritised portfolio of customer improvement opportunities, with clear problem statements, supporting evidence, accountable owners, expected outcomes, and measurement plans.

- Establish customer escalation, follow-up, and cross-functional review processes to address immediate concerns and systemic issues.

- Embed VoC insights into product roadmaps, service design, business planning, operating reviews, and investment decisions.

- Track the implementation and effectiveness of improvement initiatives, measuring post-change outcomes and communicating progress to relevant stakeholders.

- Build a culture in which customer insights consistently inform decisions and business leaders take ownership of delivering improvements.

H. Team Leadership and Capability Development:

- Recruit, develop, and lead a high-performing team spanning customer research, analytics, insight generation, program management, and VoC operations.

- Establish clear performance expectations and promote methodological rigour, customer empathy, intellectual honesty, collaboration, and business impact.

- Coach team members to move beyond reporting customer feedback towards identifying root causes, generating strategic insights, and recommending practical solutions.

- Build capabilities in advanced research, analytics, storytelling, technology-enabled insights, and executive stakeholder management.

- Develop talent, succession plans, and a culture of continuous learning and constructive challenge.

- Build strong partnerships across business units and embed customer-centric thinking throughout the enterprise.

3. Candidate Profile and Experience:

The ideal candidate will be an accomplished customer insights and experience leader with a track record of building, transforming, and scaling enterprise-wide VoC capabilities in complex, multi-business environments.

Essential qualifications and experience:

- Significant senior leadership experience in Voice of Customer, Customer Experience, Customer Insights, Market Research, or a closely related discipline.

- Proven experience designing and implementing enterprise-level VoC programs across multiple business units, customer segments, and channels.

- Strong expertise across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C customer environments, including the ability to distinguish enterprise relationships from individual customer experiences.

- Deep knowledge of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, survey design, sampling, statistical analysis, segmentation, and customer experience measurement.

- Strong understanding of NPS, CSAT, CES, customer journey measurement, relationship research, and transactional feedback.

- Demonstrated ability to integrate customer research with operational, behavioural, digital, and financial data.

- Experience leading VoC technology implementations, platform modernisation, vendor management, and enterprise change initiatives.

- Proven ability to influence senior executives and translate customer insights into business decisions and measurable improvements.

- Experience building, leading, and developing multidisciplinary research and analytics teams.

4. Preferred Experience:

- Experience in financial services, wealth management, retirement solutions, employee benefits, or related customer-centric industries.

- Familiarity with VoC and customer experience platforms such as Qualtrics or Medallia.

- Experience with AI-enabled text analytics, speech analytics, sentiment analysis, and advanced customer insight technologies.

- Demonstrated success connecting customer experience measures to retention, customer engagement, revenue growth, operational efficiency, and cost to serve.

- Experience operating in regulated environments with strong data privacy, governance, and risk management requirements.

- Exposure to enterprise transformation programs involving multiple business units, legacy platforms, and complex stakeholder ecosystems.

5. Critical Leadership Competencies:

- Strategic thinking: Ability to establish a long-term enterprise vision and translate it into an executable roadmap.

- Research and analytical rigour: Strong command of research methodology, statistical interpretation, and evidence-based decision-making.

- Business orientation: Ability to connect customer insights to commercial outcomes, operational priorities, and investment decisions.

- Executive influence: Confidence in challenging established assumptions, influencing senior stakeholders, and building consensus across functions.

- Transformation leadership: Experience driving technology adoption, process change, and sustainable enterprise-wide implementation.

- Communication and storytelling: Ability to make complex research findings accessible, compelling, and actionable.

- People leadership: Ability to attract talent, build high-performing teams, and develop future leaders.

- Customer-centric mindset: A strong commitment to improving customer outcomes through measurable, evidence-based action.

6. Measures of Success:

Success in the role will be assessed through the ability to:

- Establish a mature, scalable, and integrated enterprise VoC capability.

- Improve the quality, reliability, and adoption of customer insights across business units.

- Demonstrate effective integration of research, behavioural, operational, and financial data.

- Increase the proportion of customer insights translated into prioritised, implemented, and measured business improvements.

- Strengthen executive engagement and accountability for customer experience outcomes.

- Demonstrate measurable improvements in relevant customer experience, retention, engagement, and operational performance indicators.

- Build a high-performing team and establish sustainable governance, technology, and operating practices.

7. Overall Mandate:

The Head of Voice of Customer (VoC) & Customer Insights will be responsible for building an enterprise capability that makes customer understanding a core input into strategic and operational decision-making.

The successful leader will combine research excellence, analytical depth, technology-enabled innovation, executive influence, and disciplined execution to ensure that customer insights drive meaningful and measurable improvements across the enterprise.