Senior Manager, Customer Experience – Corp Admin

About The Second City: 

Dedicated to entertaining, inspiring, and transforming through innovative live experiences, The Second City is the premier brand in improv and sketch comedy. With sold-out shows playing on resident stages in Chicago and Toronto, Second City’s Touring Theatrical companies also entertain an additional one million theatergoers a year around the globe. The Second City Training Centre is the largest school of improvisation-based arts on the planet, with brick-and-mortar locations in Chicago, Toronto, New York and a virtual division offering accessible classes online worldwide. Second City Works, the B2B side of Second City, has brought award-winning improvisation and audience-driven techniques to over 600 Fortune 1000 companies, challenging businesses seeking a more collaborative culture to innovate through development programs, original digital and video content, campaign consultation, private events, and more.

For additional information about The Second City please visit: www.secondcity.com

Position Summary: 

The Senior Manager, Customer Experience is responsible for delivering the highest quality customer experience across Second City Chicago’s business, including onsite Training Center classes, Resident Stage Performances, Second City Works events, and Box Office operations. Working closely with the Managing Director of Chicago, customer service teams, and event staff, this role helps ensure that projects, performances, workshops, corporate engagements, rentals, and special events are executed smoothly from planning through completion. This role requires someone who thinks about the customer first, and designs, implements and monitors processes to ensure successful and impactful interactions for all customers and customer-facing personnel.

This position will manage a team consisting of both individual contributor and management level customer-service employees and will be considered a secondary escalation point for customer service operations on nights and weekends.  This is a highly collaborative role that requires someone who has extremely effective communication skills, and demonstrates comfort and confidence moving between projects, departments, and priorities with a high level of organization and attention to detail.

Key Responsibilities: 

• Responsible for department-level personnel management of customer experience employees, including staffing, scheduling, performance managing, and developing talent across a team comprised of individual contributors, team leads and people managers
• Ensure all customer experience team members are enabled and empowered to assist customers with logistical needs necessary for the best possible customer experience
• Review, reshape, create, implement and manage a set of Customer Experience metrics and incentives that reward and enable the right behaviors, processes and positive business outcomes
• Manage and oversee systems, vendors and venue operations partnerships that are critical to the Customer Experience
• Serve as a secondary escalation onsite point of contact for clients, vendors, talent, and event organizers, looping in and communicating resolutions and changes to all stakeholders as necessary
• Create, launch, lead and successfully action strategic, timebound and tactical project plans that improve the Customer Experience

Qualifications: 

• 5+ years of experience managing and leading people in a Customer Experience / Customer Service function, including demonstrated ability to manage and develop successful, respected, results-oriented leaders.
• Bachelor’s degree in Arts Management, Hospitality Management, Business Administration, or equivalent relevant industry experience.
• Demonstrated ability to think strategically about the Customer Experience and deliver positive, metric-driven business outcomes as a result.
• Able to work a flexible onsite schedule (generally M-F, 12P-8P) that regularly includes nights and weekends.
• Demonstrated ability to take a project from ideation to planning and all the way through to successful execution.
• Demonstrated comfort level with leading change for an organization, including excellent planning, coordination, and communication across stakeholders. Demonstrated ability to deftly and effectively communicate information successfully across all levels and different types of constituents (customers, colleagues, peers, executive-level leadership, etc.)
• Demonstrated ability to successfully deliver on small tasks and larger-scale projects while managing multiple projects, deadlines, and stakeholders simultaneously.
• Demonstrated ability to determine work, priorities and goals with minimal direct guidance, working both autonomously and highly collaboratively where required.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to remain calm and solutions-oriented in a fast-paced environment.
• Proficiency with common workplace technology tools and project management systems.
• Familiarity with union agreements and/or other applicable entertainment unions is an asset.

Core Values 

The Second City is invested in evaluating candidate alignment with the requirements of the role and desired qualifications, as well as with our core values.  Our core values are:

• • We are a Yes, And Ensemble
  • We are all creatives
  • We laugh together
  • We are resilient improvisers
  • We value our legacy

The Second City is an open, inclusive workplace and welcome applicants who bring along with them diverse life experiences, including every permutation of economic and cultural backgrounds, orientation, ethnicity and points of view. We strive to continue our efforts to work with people who may otherwise be marginalized or underrepresented in our business and around our community.