Head of Customer Operations

Job description

**Mission:** To own the customer at Skip - every escalation, every sensitive decision, every broken process - and turn what we learn into systems that make Skip the easiest lender in the country to deal with. Skip is scaling fast. Volumes are multiples of last year, we have major distribution partnerships live, and every one of those loans is someone’s home. As we grow, the number of customer moments that really matter - the delayed settlement, the declined application, the hardship call, the case that does not fit the policy - grows with us. Today too many of those moments land on the Head of Operations. This role exists to change that. It gives Skip a single, senior owner of the customer: someone accountable for both the hard individual calls and the systemic fixes that stop those calls recurring. It is real leverage for the Head of Operations, and real ownership for you. This is not a complaints-handling role and it is not a role for someone who wants to administer a queue. It is for an operator who takes the customer’s side, makes the call, and then rebuilds the process so nobody has to make that call again. **About the role:** You will lead Customer Operations at Skip, with our Operations Lead and Home Loan Specialists reporting to you. Between them, your team touches the customer at every stage of the journey - first conversation, application, approval, settlement and servicing. You own how that feels. You are the decision-maker on escalated and sensitive customer matters. Complaints, hardship, distressed settlements, cases where the policy answer and the right answer are not the same. You will make fast, commercially sound calls with real money and real reputation attached, know when to spend to protect a customer relationship and when to hold the line, and be able to explain your reasoning to a founder, a funder or a regulator without flinching. The other half of the job is building. Every escalation is a signal. You will root-cause them, redesign the process, rewrite the communication, work with Product and Engineering to automate the fix, and then measure whether it actually worked. Over time the escalation volume should fall because of what you built, not because you got faster at firefighting. This is a player-coach role. You will lead a small, high-calibre team and grow it as we scale, but you will also stay close to the work - reading the real conversations, taking the hardest calls yourself, and making sure the systems you design hold up in practice. At Skip, our leaders roll up their sleeves and contribute alongside their teams. It is a high agency, high ownership role in a business that moves quickly. If you want a defined lane and a stable playbook, this is not it. If you want to own the customer end of a fast-growing lender and build the function that carries it to the next stage, it is. **Key Responsibilities:** **Own the customer** - Own the end-to-end customer experience across the lending journey - from first - contact through application, settlement and servicing - Be the final decision-maker within Operations on escalated customer issues, sensitive matters and exceptions - make the call and own the outcome - Own complaints end-to-end: intake, investigation, resolution, response and reporting - meeting our internal dispute resolution obligations and, more importantly, leaving customers feeling heard - Own hardship, distressed settlements and other high-sensitivity situations with both empathy and rigour - Own the customer measures that matter - NPS and CSAT, complaint volumes, repeat contact rate, time to resolution - and be accountable for moving them **Build and improve the process** - Root-cause every escalation and close it out with a structural fix - a repeat escalation is a process failure, not a customer problem - Map, redesign and continuously improve customer-facing processes across origination, settlement and servicing, removing friction wherever you find it - Own our customer communications -the templates, the tone, the timing - so customers are told what is happening before they must ask - Partner with Product and Engineering to turn manual workarounds into product, and to introduce automation and AI-driven efficiency where it improves the customer outcome - Build the playbooks, decision frameworks and escalation matrix that let the team make good calls quickly without needing you in the room - Improve the handoffs between Sales, Credit, Operations and Settlements so nothing is dropped between teams **Lead and grow the team** - Lead, coach and develop the Customer Operations team - our Operations Lead and Home Loan Specialists - and scale it as volumes grow - Set the standard for how Skip speaks to customers: clever, thoughtful, honest, and always in the customer’s long term interest - Build a high-performance culture with clear standards, real feedback and genuine career growth - Operate as a player-coach - stay close to live customer conversations and step in on the hardest cases yourself **Provide commercial leverage** - Give the Head of Operations genuine leverage - customer issues should stop with you, not travel further up - Own decision authority on goodwill, remediation and commercial resolutions, and make transparent, defensible trade-offs between customer outcome, cost and risk - Represent the voice of the customer at leadership level with evidence, not anecdote - and push the roadmap accordingly - Work across Credit, Sales, Marketing and our external partners (brokers, solicitors, valuers, funders) to resolve issues that cross organisational boundaries - Escalate the right things at the right time - and decide everything else yourself **What you will bring:** - 7-12 years in customer operations, service delivery or operations leadership - ideally in a high-growth startup, fintech, lender or bank - including 2+ years leading a team of teams or leading leaders - Experience owning a customer function end-to-end - you have carried the number, not just run the process - A track record of turning escalations into structural fixes: you can point to problems that stopped happening because of something you built - Genuine customer centricity - you instinctively take the customer’s side, and you can tell the difference between what is convenient for us and what is right for them - Genuine operational capability - you can map a process, find the friction, redesign it, document it and land the change with the people who have to live with it - Commercial judgement - you are comfortable making decisions with money and reputation attached, and you can explain your reasoning clearly - Calm under pressure - angry customers, tight timeframes, incomplete information, and a decision still required today - Excellent written communication - you can write the difficult email, and you set the standard for how the team writes - A hands-on builder mindset and a high ownership instinct - you move quickly, independently, and without waiting for permission - Comfort with modern tooling and automation - CRM, workflow tools, data and AI - and no tolerance for repetitive manual work - Experience with complaints, hardship or regulated dispute resolution frameworks (IDR, AFCA, NCCP) is advantageous but not essential Mortgage industry experience is not required. We are looking for someone who can learn the domain quickly and bring best-in-class thinking about customers and operations from wherever they have done it well. **Why join us:** - **Own the customer at a company where that actually means something.** Customer Centric is one of our four values, and this role is where it gets tested every day - **Real decision rights.** You will have a mandate, a budget and the authority to use them - not a delegated slice of someone else’s job - **Build, don’t maintain.** The function is small and the processes are young. You will design them, not inherit them - **A clear path.** This is a leadership role with a growing team beneath it, reporting into the Head of Operations. If you perform, the scope grows with the business - **Serious company, serious scale.** Backed by leading US venture funds, global credit partners and prominent Australian investors, with a loan book scaling rapidly and major distribution partnerships already live - **A positive impact.** Your work helps hard working Australians Skip to home ownership sooner - **A team that backs you.** We move fast, we take ownership, and we back each other to do the best work of our careers