Operations Manager - SMR Indoor Operations

Location

Oldbury (Hybrid working, 3 office days per week)

Employment Type

Permanent

Why Join Us?

• Take ownership of the day-to-day indoor operation supporting our rapidly growing Mobile Mechanic and Service, Maintenance and Repair (SMR) proposition.
• Lead the teams responsible for keeping work moving, including dispatch, work-in-progress management, operational coordination, and customer recovery.
• Play a key role in improving operational control as SMR continues to scale, ensuring we deliver a reliable and predictable service for customers and our frontline technicians.
• Use real-time performance insight to identify issues quickly, remove operational blockers, and improve customer outcomes.
• Lead, coach, and develop operational leaders and colleagues within a fast-paced environment undergoing significant transformation.

Company Description / Business Unit

For over a century, The AA has been keeping Britain moving. Today, millions of drivers trust us to be there when it matters most, and we're equally committed to supporting the people who make that possible. With a 4.5-star Glassdoor rating, we've built a culture where colleagues are empowered to grow, collaborate, and make a real impact for our customers on every journey. This has been recognized by Sunday Times “Best Places to Work” for the last two years.

Job Description

As Operations Manager - SMR Indoor Operations, you will lead the operational control environment supporting our Mobile Mechanic and wider SMR activity.

You will be responsible for ensuring the indoor operation delivers effective day-to-day management of workload, technician support, dispatch activity, work in progress, and customer exceptions. You will create clear operational rhythms, establish strong ownership, and ensure emerging risks are identified and acted upon quickly.

Working closely with field operations, planning, technology, customer teams, and commercial stakeholders, you will help ensure the right work reaches the right resource at the right time and that issues affecting delivery are resolved with pace.

This is an opportunity for an experienced operational leader who is comfortable working in a high-volume, performance-led environment and can combine strong people leadership with operational discipline, customer focus, and continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the indoor SMR operation, creating clear accountability for operational performance, customer outcomes, and colleague experience.
• Lead and develop managers and colleagues responsible for SMR dispatch, work-in-progress management, operational support, and customer exception handling.
• Establish effective daily operational rhythms, ensuring workload, resource availability, capacity, service risks, and customer issues are actively managed.
• Maintain strong oversight of SMR work in progress, identifying aged or at-risk jobs and driving timely intervention to reduce broken promises and poor customer outcomes.
• Ensure effective dispatch and workload management, supporting the optimum use of Mobile Mechanic capacity and improving technician productivity.
• Work closely with field operational leaders to provide joined-up management of technician performance, availability, and operational constraints.
• Use management information and real-time performance data to understand demand, capacity, and service performance, translating insight into clear actions.
• Identify systemic causes of operational failure and work with Planning, Technology, Product, and other stakeholders to deliver sustainable improvements.
• Strengthen customer recovery processes, ensuring exceptions and service failures are owned, resolved quickly, and used to drive future learning.
• Lead continuous improvement across indoor SMR processes, reducing unnecessary manual intervention and creating simpler, more scalable ways of working.
• Ensure colleagues understand operational priorities, service expectations, and their individual accountability for delivering a high-quality customer experience.
• Manage resources effectively, balancing customer service, colleague capacity, productivity, and cost.
• Build strong relationships across Road Operations and Car Care, ensuring indoor operations remain closely connected to the wider SMR strategy and transformation roadmap.
• Maintain appropriate operational controls, governance, and escalation routes, ensuring risks are visible and acted upon with pace.