Chief of Staff - Customer

Department: Customer Success
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Zinc - London
Reporting To: Tom Jewell
Compensation: £90,000 - £95,000 / year

Description

At Zinc, we're rapidly technologising how we serve candidates, recruiters, and customers, without eroding what makes our service genuinely good. This is a brand-new role at Zinc: part of a small, fast-moving team that exists to accelerate the customer function's ability to continuously improve how we serve customers, through better technology, process, and entirely new capabilities.

You'll report directly to the Chief Customer Officer, and partner closely with the Director of CS, Director of Retention + Expansion, and Head of Ops. Right now, the team's first big mandate is standing up a 24-hour, multi-region outsourced live-chat operation, but that's one project among many. This role exists to take on the big, cross-functional things that currently move too slowly (or don't start at all) because the people who'd need to run them are already fully occupied serving customers.

What's more, you will be a key strategic partner to our CCO Tom, helping to ensure the Customer function strategy is executed across the business.

This is a new function with no fixed playbook and no large dedicated team to lean on; you'll build capability mostly through people who don't fully report to you.

This is a brand new role with impact that sits across a complex cross-functional group of people and problems. Ambiguity about scope and shape isn't a bug here; it's most of the job in year one.

A meaningful chunk of your time goes into managing the tension between colleagues' day-job commitments and the new work you need from them; this takes real influence and negotiation, not just a project plan.

You'll operate at very different altitudes in the same week: deep in a specific vendor negotiation one day, shaping cross-functional prioritisation with the CCO the next.

We are open to diverse backgrounds that can bring transferable skills to this role, but expect the ideal candidate to come from one of the following backgrounds:

• Ex-strategy consultants turned operators
• Startup Operations + Strategy roles
• Customer Transformation Leaders
• People Ops/Experience Leaders

Key Responsibilities 🗝️

• Lead time-boxed, high-stakes transformation projects that neither the AM nor CS team can resource themselves, starting with outsourcing vendor selection and commercial set-up, with more to follow as the strategy demands it.
• Act as the single point deciding which cross-functional, currently-unowned problem gets tackled next (e.g. the automation gap behind our fastest-growing support-ticket category). Nobody owns this today; you will.
• Stand new capability up, prove it works, then hand it to the relevant delivery team to run as business-as-usual. This team builds and transitions; it doesn't accumulate permanent ownership of everything it touches.
• Pull in Core Ops (via the Head of Ops) as additional project capacity (systems, data, analysis) for the "how," while this role owns the "what" and "why." With only a small team of your own, you'll get things done by mobilising others across the org.
• Our CCO Tom - as well as his two Directors - will rely on you to challenge and build their strategic thinking, and then to enable Zinc to execute the Customer Function strategy as the business continues to rapidly scale. You will need a strategic brain, a transparent communication style + executional prowess to nail this part of the role.
• Manage a service experience designer working full-time on new initiatives, plus another team member who will split their time between existing single-owner responsibility and new work for this team. Getting genuine new output from people who are also still running something else is a core part of the job. One team member initially stays managed by the Director of AM until you're in seat, then moves under you.
• Once you're up to speed, you'll scope and hire the team's Maker role yourself, defining what capability the team actually needs rather than inheriting a pre-written job spec. We're deliberately not filling this ahead of you landing.
• Make sure Zinc's customer experience keeps evolving as fast as customer expectations do (voice of customer, NPS, and customer education included) as much a building function as an improving one.