Team Manager - Customer Experience

About the role

As a Team Manager, you are a customer-focused retail leader responsible for delivering an exceptional in-store experience that drives customer satisfaction, loyalty and sales performance. You will lead from the shop floor, ensuring service standards, customer engagement and operational execution are consistently delivered to create a seamless shopping journey for every customer. 

You will provide daily direction to the store team through coaching, motivation and real-time support, creating a positive and engaging environment for both customers and colleagues. By developing colleagues' service skills, customer focus and product knowledge, you will drive exceptional service behaviours, maximise customer engagement and support the delivery of commercial goals in a fast-paced retail environment. 

Key Responsibilities 

Leadership and people:  

• Create an engaging, customer-focused store environment where colleagues feel motivated, confident and empowered to deliver exceptional service. 
• Foster a positive service culture through regular coaching, feedback and recognition, ensuring colleagues are equipped to deliver outstanding customer experiences. 
• Lead by example on the shop floor, demonstrating exceptional service standards, customer engagement and sales behaviours. 
• Recognise and reward colleague contribution, reinforcing a culture of accountability, customer focus and performance. 
• Work closely with the store management team to strengthen service leadership capability and ensure the store delivers a consistently high-quality customer experience. 
• Foster a high-performance culture through engaging team briefs, ensuring colleagues understand customer priorities, service expectations and business goals. 
• Coach colleagues to confidently resolve customer queries, manage complaints effectively and deliver service recovery that promotes customer loyalty. 

Commercial and customer performance:   

• Drive a customer-focused culture where the whole team understands the impact of service standards on sales performance and customer loyalty. 
• Maintain a strong focus on customer experience, ensuring the store delivers a consistent and high-quality omni-channel journey. 
• Lead exceptional service behaviours across the store, ensuring customers receive a warm welcome and a consistent end-to-end shopping experience. 
• Lead the delivery of checkout standards, queue management, queue barrier standards, fitting room experience and service recovery. 
• Champion omni-channel service performance, supporting Click & Collect, customer returns, Swipe, contactable customer growth and app sign-up initiatives. 
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• Respond to customer feedback promptly and professionally, ensuring effective follow-up, resolution and learning from customer insight. 
• Proactively identify and fulfil customer needs, queries and concerns to deliver an exceptional shopping experience. 
• Demonstrate a strong understanding of the store business plan, taking proactive action to maximise sales, customer satisfaction and overall performance. 
• Demonstrate and inspire excellent product knowledge across the team, utilising understanding of the range to drive customer engagement and maximise sales opportunities. 

Operational excellence:  

• Drive consistent customer experience standards through the effective implementation of company processes, service routines and One Best Way initiatives. 
• Ensure company policies and procedures are adhered to and role model compliant ways of working. 
• Conduct regular floor walks to review customer experience, product availability, shop floor standards and presentation, taking action to drive improvements and maximise trading opportunities. 
• Maintain high standards across customer touchpoints including service desks, checkouts, fitting rooms and Click & Collect areas. 
• Support the delivery of customer experience measures and service KPIs, ensuring actions are taken to improve performance. 
• Proactively identify and resolve issues that may negatively impact the customer experience. 
• Ensure customer areas remain safe, welcoming, clean and fully operational throughout the trading day. 

Strategy delivery and improvement:  

• Support the communication of business priorities, ensuring colleagues understand daily goals and how their role contributes to store performance. 
• Inspire and align the store team, ensuring every colleague understands their role in delivering exceptional customer experiences and achieving store targets. 
• Use customer feedback, service measures, commercial reporting and shop floor insight to identify opportunities for improvement. 
• Share best practice and ideas with the wider team, contributing to a culture of continuous improvement in customer experience and service standards. 
• Support customer-focused initiatives, launches and business change activity to ensure successful implementation and adoption. 

Collaboration:   

• Collaborate with the Management Team and colleagues across the region to support business initiatives and deliver consistent customer experience standards. 
• Build strong relationships with key stakeholders to support service excellence and operational effectiveness. 
• Share insights, learning and effective ways of working with other stores and regional peers. 
• Work closely with operational and visual merchandising teams to ensure a seamless customer journey across all areas of the store. 
• Undertake Duty Manager responsibilities, ensuring the store operates safely, efficiently and compliantly while providing clear leadership and direction to colleagues throughout the trading day. 

About You

Leadership 

• Experience supporting the day-to-day running of a fast-paced retail store, contributing to strong commercial, operational and people results. 
• Strong coaching skills, with the ability to support and develop a high-performing team. 
• Ability to foster an inclusive, positive and customer-focused team culture. 

Commercial Acumen 

• Demonstrates the ability to identify customer and sales opportunities and take action to drive performance improvements. 
• A sound understanding of commercial and financial levers, and how customer experience supports store performance. 
• Able to use data and insights to identify trends, understand customer behaviour and recommend improvements. 

Operational Excellence 

• Good understanding of retail customer service processes and the importance of consistently delivering high standards. 
• Experience embedding best practice and delivering exceptional customer experiences within a customer-facing environment. 
• Demonstrates strong understanding of store operations and the impact they have on the customer journey.   

Communication & Collaboration 

• Clear, confident communicator who can engage, influence and challenge constructively. 
• Proven ability to build strong working relationships and collaborate effectively with stakeholders across the business. 
• Ability to lead, motivate and inspire teams to achieve customer service and commercial goals. 

About Matalan

From humble beginnings to disruptive innovations in the retail industry, find out about how Matalan is ever-evolving here. 

We know as a team, we are stronger together – we champion equality for all and make lasting connections that go beyond work. We thrive off our inclusive culture, encouraging our colleagues to bring their true selves to work and contributing to collective creativity, open-mindedness and growth.

We want give every candidate the opportunity to perform at their best throughout the application and interview process and then ultimately in their role. If you require any adjustments during our recruitment process, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

In the event that a high volume of suitable applications are received, the post may close prior to the specified closing date. Please apply as soon as possible if interested. 

Benefits

In addition to competitive salaries, we also offer the below core benefits:

• 20% staff discount, which increases with length of service
• Thrive Recognition Scheme 
• Wellbeing support provided by the Retail Trust 
• Life Assurance 
• Retail Rewards platform offering discounts for other retailers 
• Pension Scheme 
• Access to a wide range of career development 
• Additional benefits may apply depending on your role and area of the business