Manager, Travel Services

About the role

The Travel Service Manager oversees a team of Travel and Lead Travel consultants and has overall accountability for the success of their teams' performance. They lead, direct, motivate, challenge, develop and monitor their team towards the service philosophy: We are providing industry-leading service to our customers for them to have an exceptional and seamless travel and expense experience, while achieving unparalleled efficiency levels.

Responsibilities

• Ensure your team is developing through regular review of interactions, coaching sessions and 1:1 meetings
• Have an in-depth understanding of travel consultants' daily responsibilities by conducting email, voice and chat interactions
• Perform Quality Evaluations on travel consultant interactions, effectively interrogating travel bookings (in travel tools) and requests to ensure standards of service are consistently excellent
• Monitor and highlight any errors, ensuring you are providing constructive feedback and coaching consultants on preventative actions
• Regularly review consultant and team performance metrics to identify areas of opportunity in critical core competencies and provide feedback
• Communicate with clear expectations to ensure agents are self-driven and motivated to meet and exceed the expectations of their role
• Partner with all cross-functional teams to address agent errors and learning needs and suggest ways to improve consultant performance
• Manage any escalations and customer communication and own all customer issues through to completion
• Participate in various projects to help develop, guide, and implement effective processes that will have a successful impact on service delivery and results
• Work with Operations & Service Leadership to regularly review, update and share global metrics for success and supervise performance of those metrics
• Ensure their team is globally aligned to organization expectations, quality, performance and behaviors through team meetings
• Lead consultants through change as an active change agent, encouraging their feedback and ensuring they are clear on how changes impact their roles
• Support in consultant recruitment and new starter inductions to ensure team consistency
• Highlight and manage any employee performance concerns, escalating to People Success/Senior Leadership where necessary
• Monitor and identify processes or procedures impacting team productivity
• Cascade travel industry updates and changes to your team with confidence and knowledge

Qualifications

• 7+ years sound Travel Industry knowledge & experience
• 5+ years progressive leadership experience in a TMC/travel industry contact support center environment, ie Agent -> Lead -> Supervisor
• 3 years travel industry experience at the Manager level (managing team consultants, leads, supervisors etc)
• Advanced level knowledge of Sabre / Amadeus GDS and online/offline Travel operational processes
• Knowledge of, and familiarity with, CRM applications (e.g. Salesforce, ZenDesk, etc)

Skills

• Customer-Centric: The customer is at the forefront of everything we do -- you must live and breathe customer service and promote high customer engagement through all interactions
• Build relationships and motivate people and teams, creating a knowledge sharing attitude whilst encouraging engagement
• Proven mentor and motivator with a clear understanding of the travel service requirements, customer base, and challenges facing a fast-growing company
• Excellent organizational skills & interpersonal skills
• Excellent, professional written and verbal communication skills, presentation and facilitation skills
• Ability to work independently and effectively as part of a team
• Business analytics - Data driven with the ability to apply and use data analytics to gain deeper, real-time insights into agent performance and trends
• Results driven and proactive with ability to own and execute area of responsibility with excellence
• Technically proficient in all Navan technology and supplier tools
• Demonstrate ability to make effective use of available resources to complete tasks to agreed timelines
• Leading by example at all times
• Solid business acumen
• Flexibility to work non-traditional shifts where required