Customer Accounts Manager

At Sovereign, our vision is to have a positive and lasting impact on our customers lives by offering them safe high-quality homes and connected communities. We’ll do this by shaping our services around customer, asset, and place within specific localities.

We have a fantastic opportunity for a Customer Accounts Managerto join us to support in managing and delivering our income recovery service. We want to drive and embed a data driven service that enables us to make sound decisions and respond to performance, customer need and external influences quickly and robustly.

Based from either our new Greenham Hub near Newbury, our offices in Christchurch or Blandford, you’ll be managing a team to provide support across our South Hampshire and Isle of Wightlocalities. You’ll combine time in the office with working from home and some travel across your locality area to meet the team where required, ensuring visible leadership. You should have access to transport and be happy to travel.

The Role

Reporting into a Senior Customer Accounts Manager and leading a small busy team of Customer Accounts Officers and Customer Income Advisors, you’ll be accountable for the delivery of a sector leading, tenure blind income recovery service across your locality.

You’ll be responsible for ensuring the effective delivery of day-to-day income collection and related services to our residents, helping us to shape our service with a focus on delivering exceptional customer service. You’ll work collaboratively with the wider management team to achieve our performance targets, operational and financial goals, and ensure the service is in-keeping with regulatory, legislative and industry best practice.

Responsibilities include:

• Providing visible leadership to a designated team and as a manager within the wider team, demonstrating professionalism and developing a high performing and well supported team
• Working collaboratively with the wider management team to deliver challenging targets, flexing resource in line with whole service need, meeting agreed performance, service and financial standards and ensuring we deliver high levels of customer satisfaction, cost effectiveness and value for money
• Ensuring that your team works collaboratively with the locality management team and teams within the wider income service to deliver a customer-centric service
• Collaborating with peers and leading subgroups to deliver business effectiveness and creative solutions with a focus on implementing a proactive data led approach to improve delivery efficiencies and customer’s service
• Responsible for data related to Income performance deliveryas set out in Sovereign’s data landscape

What you’ll need

You should have experience in a similar role, with demonstrable knowledge and experience in income recovery within social housing across a variety of tenures. It would be desirable to have working knowledge of managing arrears in rented, leasehold and shared ownership properties. You’ll have operational experience of leading and motivating an end-to-end rent/income collection team.

You should have up-to-date knowledge of legislation, regulations, standards, and external influences relating to income collection for a variety of social housing tenures ideally including rented, shared ownership, market rented and leasehold, income collection, former tenant accounts, welfare benefits. You’ll also need:

• Experience in targeting and driving service performance, ensuring that resources are appropriately deployed through a data-led analytical approach
• The ability to effectively manage and lead a team; inspiring, supporting and developing them to optimise their performance
• A track record of meeting deadlines and working effectively with others to achieve targets
• Strong people skills and you’ll be an effective communicator, with the ability to influence and challenge
• Evidence of excellent customer service achievements in a complex delivery environment
• Excellent oral and written communication and interpersonal skills
• We encourage the membership of a professional body – CIH (Chartered Institute of Housing) or equivalent but this isn’t essential

What you’ll receive from us

We have some fantastic benefits on offer at Sovereign, including:

• £450 flex-pot annually, discounted shopping & cycling scheme
• 25 Days Holiday + Bank Holidays (with an extra day every year up to 30 days)
• Opportunity to buy and sell up to 5 days holiday per year
• Company pension scheme matched up to 12%, life cover at 4x your salary
• Flexible working - we’re committed to giving people flexibility as widely as possible
• Options for private medical insurance, dental insurance & critical illness cover

At Sovereign we are committed to our Equality Diversity and Inclusion strategy and believe that you can truly be yourself at Sovereign. Take a look at our careers site to learn more about us and our values.

This is a great opportunity to join the team as we progress through an exciting period of change. What we do makes a real difference to people’s lives and by joining us you can share the satisfaction of doing something that really matters.