Customer Complaints Senior Manager

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Customer Complaints Senior Manager based in Germany.** This is a senior compliance leadership role responsible for a global customer complaints program across multiple jurisdictions. You’ll oversee the end-to-end complaints framework, ensuring consistent handling, strong governance, regulatory alignment, and effective customer outcomes. The role combines second-line oversight, quality assurance, conduct-risk analysis, regulatory response coordination, and executive reporting. You’ll work closely with Compliance, Legal, Customer Support, Product, Operations, and Risk teams across a geographically distributed organization. A key focus will be transforming complaint data into actionable intelligence by identifying trends, root causes, control gaps, and potential systemic risks. You’ll also coordinate complex regulatory inquiries and escalated complaints, ensuring responses are accurate, defensible, timely, and appropriately tracked through remediation. This is an influential opportunity for an experienced compliance professional who can combine strong regulatory judgment with analytical thinking and cross-functional leadership. ### Accountabilities - Own and develop the global customer complaints program, establishing consistent standards for complaint identification, classification, investigation, resolution, escalation, documentation, and closed-loop validation. - Coordinate responses to regulatory inquiries, examinations, information requests, escalated complaints, and other supervisory matters in partnership with Legal and local Compliance teams. - Gather and validate cross-functional information, prepare clear and defensible written regulatory responses, manage review and approval processes, meet regulatory deadlines, and track resulting commitments and remediation through closure. - Partner with local Heads of Compliance to monitor jurisdiction-specific regulatory developments and ensure global policies, standards, procedures, and controls remain aligned with applicable local requirements. - Lead second-line oversight and quality assurance through risk-based testing of complaint handling, identification of control gaps and customer-outcome issues, remediation tracking, and escalation of material concerns. - Analyze complaint data to identify trends, recurring issues, overdue cases, regulatory complaints, customer-impact patterns, and potential systemic conduct or compliance risks. - Drive root-cause analysis and systemic remediation, assessing whether broader customer populations may be affected and ensuring appropriate corrective actions are identified and followed through. - Maintain complaints governance, including the complaints management database, service-level requirements, escalation thresholds, documentation standards, and governance processes across regions. - Own executive and compliance leadership reporting, providing clear insights into complaint volumes, trends, customer outcomes, emerging risks, remediation, and control effectiveness. - Serve as the central Compliance point of contact for material complaints and regulatory escalations, ensuring consistent governance, appropriate escalation, and defensible documentation. - Drive continuous improvement of the complaints framework by incorporating quality assurance results, regulatory developments, complaint trends, and lessons learned into stronger controls and processes. - Influence geographically dispersed teams and senior stakeholders to promote consistent complaint management practices and strong customer-outcome standards. ### Requirements: - Significant experience in regulatory compliance, conduct risk, consumer protection, customer complaints oversight, or a closely related discipline, ideally within a highly regulated and globally distributed organization. - Strong experience developing and managing responses to regulators, including regulatory inquiries, information requests, examinations, escalated customer complaints, and other supervisory matters. - Demonstrated ability to coordinate cross-functional inputs, produce clear and defensible written responses, manage regulatory deadlines, and track commitments and remediation through completion. - Proven experience owning or overseeing multi-jurisdictional compliance frameworks, including translating regulatory requirements into scalable global standards, controls, monitoring, and governance while incorporating local requirements appropriately. - Strong regulatory and customer-outcome judgment, with the ability to distinguish individual service issues from matters presenting regulatory, conduct, consumer-harm, reputational, or systemic risk. - Demonstrated experience conducting root-cause analysis and driving systemic remediation, including assessing broader customer impact and coordinating corrective action. - Strong second-line oversight and challenge capabilities, including experience with risk-based monitoring, quality assurance, issue escalation, remediation tracking, and governance processes. - Strong analytical and reporting capabilities, including trend analysis, service-level monitoring, management information, and executive reporting. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with regulators, Legal, Compliance, senior executives, and cross-functional stakeholders. - Proven ability to influence geographically dispersed teams and senior stakeholders without relying solely on direct authority. - Experience designing or overseeing a global customer complaints program across multiple regulatory regimes is highly desirable. - Familiarity with customer protection and complaints-handling expectations across major regulatory frameworks, including the FCA, CFPB, MAS, European Supervisory Authorities such as EBA, ESMA, and EIOPA, and other relevant national authorities or dispute-resolution bodies is a plus. - Relevant professional certification or advanced qualification such as CAMS, CFE, CRCM, CCEP/CCEP-I, ICA compliance qualifications, CIA, CRCMP, JD, or an equivalent compliance, risk, audit, or legal credential is advantageous. ### Benefits: - Opportunity to lead a high-impact global customer complaints and compliance program across multiple jurisdictions. - Senior-level exposure to regulatory, conduct-risk, customer-outcome, and enterprise compliance matters. - Close collaboration with Legal, Compliance, Risk, Customer Support, Product, and Operations teams across an international environment. - Opportunity to shape global complaints governance, quality assurance, monitoring, reporting, and remediation frameworks. - High degree of influence over regulatory alignment and customer-protection practices. - Exposure to complex international regulatory environments and evolving compliance expectations. - Opportunity to contribute to continuous improvement and strengthen customer outcomes at organizational scale. - Compensation and additional benefits are determined by the hiring company and will be discussed during the recruitment process.