Select how often (in days) to receive an alert:
Department: Propositions & Service Experience
Job Category:
Location: London, GB, EC2V 7QN
Date: 5 Feb 2026
Job Title: Head of Service Experience
Location: London/Glasgow/Edinburgh/Liverpool
Contract Type: Perm
Reporting to: Ella Hugh
The Role
Transform how clients experience Rathbones by taking end to end ownership of the client journey across every touchpoint, channel and service standard to consistently deliver good client outcomes. You will lead the Service Experience agenda by working shoulder to shoulder with client facing colleagues, spending real time in the business to live and breathe the journeys as they do. Through collaborative service design expertise and pragmatic cross functional delivery, you will orchestrate the diagnosis, design and implementation of experience improvements and service standards that drive client satisfaction, retention and business growth. Leading a team that creates coherent, frictionless client journeys, you will work across the organisation to embed service design principles and ensure Rathbones delivers consistent, measurable and high quality service.
Outcomes of the Role - What You'll Do
- End to End Client Experience and Service Standards Ownership
- Act as the enterprise owner of the holistic client experience from onboarding through ongoing service.
- Design, measure and continually improve journeys and service standards.
- Establish and evolve clear service standards that define what "good" looks like across key journeys and touchpoints.
- Embed service standards into operational processes through close collaboration with frontline teams.
- Ensure that good client outcomes are integrated into design, delivery and change activity.
Immersive Engagement With Client Facing Colleagues
- Work in deep partnership with client facing teams, including advisors, service teams and operations.
- Sit alongside colleagues to understand real world challenges, pain points and opportunities.
- Shadow interactions and participate in daily workflows to bring frontline insight into design priorities.
- Build credibility by ensuring service standards and improvements reflect operational realities.
Collaborative Strategic Leadership
- Drive collaboration with third party partners, data and analytics, change and transformation, and digital product teams.
- Influence senior leaders to adopt Service Experience principles and incorporate service standards into business design and regulatory programmes.
- Facilitate enterprise alignment on journey ownership, service standards and target experiences.
Virtual Team Leadership and Enterprise Influence
- Lead a team of three Service Designers focused on end to end journey design, service standards and continuous improvement.
- Provide virtual leadership across distributed teams to break down silos and ensure consistent, standards aligned experiences.
- Build collaborative relationships across organisational boundaries to embed service design practice and shared accountability.
Pragmatic Design Excellence
- Balance ambition with operational and technological realities.
- Translate insights into actionable design decisions that enhance client experience and colleague efficiency.
- Work closely with technology, digital and operational teams to ensure changes are practical, implementable and aligned with business priorities.
Analytics, Measurement and Continuous Improvement
- Partner with insights and data teams to implement meaningful measurement frameworks for journeys, service standards and outcome delivery.
- Establish practical metrics demonstrating ROI, client value and alignment with client outcomes expectations.
Embed ongoing monitoring of service standards and continuous improvement processes across the organisation
Knowledge, Skills and Experience
Collaborative & virtual leadership experience
- Senior Business Designer or Head of CX/SX experience with proven ability to lead virtually and influence across complex enterprise environments, preferably in Wealth Management, Asset Management, or Financial Services.
- Track record of leading CX/SX functions through collaborative partnerships that deliver pragmatic business outcomes.
- Experience leading virtual teams and driving practical CX/SX programmes across large, distributed organisations with cross functional, matrix style leadership capabilities.
Pragmatic technical skills
- Proficiency in collaborative design tools (Miro, Figma) with ability to facilitate virtual cross team workshops.
- Practical experience with digital ecosystems including Salesforce, CRM, and MarTech solutions.
- Balanced expertise in information architecture, interaction design, visual design, and prototyping with focus on feasible implementation.
Collaborative & pragmatic leadership competencies
- Systematic yet flexible approach to identifying realistic opportunities and implementing practical solutions through orchestrated delivery methods.
- Exceptional virtual leadership and stakeholder management skills with ability to build consensus and drive decision making across diverse, distributed groups. This is an orchestra conductor role that requires influence, credibility and clout with resources that report to other functional heads.
- Talent for translating customer insights into actionable, implementable business strategies across enterprise functions.
- Strong collaborative mindset - actively seeks input, builds on others' ideas, and creates shared ownership of solutions.
- Pragmatic problem solving - balances ideal outcomes with practical constraints, focuses on deliverable improvements over perfect solutions.
- Enterprise leadership capability - influences and leads across organisational boundaries without formal authority.