Head of Visitor Services

Salary: £40,000 - £45,000 per annum (depending on skills and competencies), plus benefits

The Landmark Trust is one of Britain’s leading heritage conservation charities. With the help of our supporters, we save historic buildings in danger of being lost forever. With skilled craftspeople and apprentices, we restore these 'Landmarks', making them available for all to enjoy for holidays (which provides the income to support their ongoing care). Open days and engagement with our communities also ensure that people can learn about and experience these extraordinary places. 

Landmark is seeking a new Head of Visitor Services to oversee the running of Landmark’s holiday properties, ensuring that we continue to provide the highest standards of customer experience for those who stay in or visit our buildings every year. Having recently been shortlisted for Which? Magazine’s travel brand of the year, our charity is seeking someone with exceptional leadership skills and proven experience of managing change. The role will suit a person who is able to see the big picture, build strong relationships and who is organised and tenacious. It is a career-defining opportunity to make a real difference by developing consistent operational processes and a data-led and customer-centric visitor strategy.

The Landmark Trust has 200 historic holiday properties across England, Scotland, Wales, the Channel Islands and Italy. Twenty-three of those are managed separately on Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel. Its core operations are split into 6 regions plus Italy, each managed by a Regional Manager. In turn the Regional Managers oversee large housekeeping and gardening teams, each local and dedicated to a specific holiday property, who are tasked with presenting their property to incoming guests in accordance with the Trust’s standards and style.

A new regional framework was implemented a year ago, with greater synergies between the Operations and Estates departments and to support Landmark’s customer-satisfaction, employee engagement and wellbeing, environmental, accessibility and public engagement aspirations.

Landmark has recently strengthened its furnishing operations so that the buying, repair and re-furnishing of our existing holiday properties has been brought in-house and delivered exclusively from our warehouse in Honeybourne.

 

Purpose

The Head of Visitor Services is required to oversee the running of the Trust’s core holiday properties (including the launch of 1-2 new properties every year), ensuring that we are providing the highest standards of customer service for our visitors and ensuring that the Health and Safety policy is adhered to throughout. In addition, this role will be required, under the leadership of the Head of Visitor Experience, to manage change in the operational structure and review current ways of working in order to strengthen Landmark for the future. It will also further embed the regional framework and furnishings operations including developing objectives with each region and the warehouse, ensuring consistent operational processes across regions, helping develop a data-led and customer-centric visitor strategy, developing improved ways of engaging with staff working at our holiday properties, set and track new customer-centric KPIs and ensure that our engagement work is well supported in the field.

 

The holiday properties on Lundy and in Italy are not currently managed by this role but the Head of Visitor Services will need to work closely with those responsible for those operations to ensure consistency. The Head of Visitor Services will oversee operations in Italy in the future.

 

The Head of Visitor Services will not generally be the first point of contact for customer complaints but will work closely with the Bookings Manager and those within the regional teams to understand issues and trends.

 

Key Accountabilities

Visitor Services

·        Be the voice of the customer on decisions made at Landmark’s properties meeting – Properties Forum, working with the Booking Manager on analysing data and trends.

·        Together with other members of Properties Forum, contribute to the creation, development and delivery of the on-site visitor strategy for Landmark, utilising ongoing customer feedback and specific customer research commissioned from time to time by the Marketing team.

·        Collaborate closely with the Head of Marketing and Bookings Manager to align and positively improve the visitor experience across all visitor touch-points.

·        Ensure outstanding customer service across all visitor operations staff by delivering a structured programme of customer service, skills development and people management skills, working closely with the Head of Marketing, the Senior People Partner and the Regional Managers.

·        Work collaboratively with the Engagement team to support and enable the delivery of on-site engagement activity.

·        Be responsible for recoupment of damages from customers, where appropriate, and the referral point for Landmark’s handling of customer complaints; work with the Bookings Manager on any review of the Complaints Policy.

·        Work collaboratively with, and provide additional senior management support for, Italian operations.

 

Regional Operations Management

·        Lead the regional management team, ensuring smooth, efficient running of visitor operations, including effective delivery of housekeeping and excellent presentation standards, on-call duty management, opening and closing of buildings, launch of new buildings, visitor and regional staff health and safety, operational fire safety, emergency management, utilities management, visitor information and support to the delivery of engagement events.

·        Oversee property compliance work in the regions, which is led day to day by a team of facilities coordinators.

·        Review the current operational structure and accountabilities and ways of working and make recommendations for improvement, seeing them through to implementation.

·        Embed a strong performance management culture across operations.

·        Act as the lead on emergency planning and response in relation to Landmark’s holiday properties.

·        Work collaboratively with the Head of Estates, both supported by the Health & Safety Advisor, to ensure the safety and security of all visitors, staff and buildings in the holiday portfolio, and lead on incident management.

·        Undertake operational management duties from time to time depending on the organisation’s needs or in times of staff absence.

·        Ensure that Landmark’s regional operations are compliant with its data protection policy.

·        Contribute to and supervise the regional roll-out of any operational requirements in relation to Landmark’s environmental and accessibility policies and any response to holiday-let licensing schemes.

·        Alongside the Head of Visitor Experience and the Head of Estates, further embed the regional framework, developing annual objectives for each region and consistent business processes including housekeeper inductions, training, regional maintenance budgets, building closures and joint annual inspections of each holiday property.

·        Alongside the Director and Head of Visitor Experience, as appropriate, lead on national stakeholder relationships, whilst supporting the local relationships between Regional Managers and councils, National Trust, managed property owners, neighbours, owners of access tracks and other stakeholders.

·        Negotiate and manage contracts and relationships with external contractors, including linen suppliers and Landmark’s emergency phone service, to ensure their performance meets KPIs and agreed service delivery standards.

·        Alongside the Head of Visitor Experience, nurture relationships within the hospitality sector.

 

Warehouse and Furnishings Management

·        Manage the Furnishing Operations Manager, who oversees the warehouse, and liaise with our Furnishings Consultant.

·        Lead and ensure the smooth, efficient running, via our warehouse and estate furnishings team, of the delivery of inventory to and maintenance of furnishings in holiday properties.

 

People Management

·        Foster a strong customer service culture, developing a high-performing team with high levels of employee engagement.

·        Develop, embed and promote a culture and system for listening to both staff and visitor feedback to enable continuous improvement across the team that empowers people to come forward with practical solutions to meet customer needs.

·        Lead and drive change management within regional operations.

·        Develop, direct and monitor the implementation of structures, systems, staffing levels and standards to deliver high levels of customer service, efficiency, staff motivation and retention and cost-effectiveness.

·        Lead on channels of communication with housekeeping and gardening staff so that a positive employee relations climate is maintained within the department which supports the creation of high levels of employee engagement.

 

Financial Management, KPIs and Technology

·        Work with the Head of Visitor Experience and Head of Corporate Services to set overall operations budgets and build management reporting via NetSuite to report on income, costs and net profit on a region and property basis.  Provide accurate, timely and up-to-date forecasts of spend to Finance and ensure effective budget management processes are in place in line with Landmark’s financials procedures.

·        Work with the IT team, Booking Office Manager and Head of Marketing to build management reporting via SalesForce to report on KPIs on a region and property basis and improve reporting and tracking of actions on customer feedback.  

·        Set and be accountable for the delivery of visitor satisfaction, helpfulness and customer service, Net Promoter Scores and staff satisfaction KPIs.

·        In conjunction with the Booking Manager and the IT team, scope and set requirements for further development of SalesForce to improve business processes and customer satisfaction KPIs.  Support testing of any roll-out of new functionality.

 

 

Interested?  To apply, please complete the attached application form and submit via the button below.

 

Vacancy closes 2nd August 2023 with interviews w/c 7th August 2023.

 

Regret, no agencies please.