Senior Research Manager

Purpose of the Job

We are looking for an experienced, enthusiastic and ambitious senior research manager.

Our goal is to have best-in-class customer insight capability and ensure it is a strategic competitive advantage. Reporting into the Head of the Customer Insights, you will play a leading role in a high performing team that brings a large organisation closer to its customers. The team act as an in-house market insight agency, as such we design, plan, and deliver insight projects from start to finish. You will be happy being hands-on and will work closely with leaders in the business ensuring that we are making the right decisions based upon the latest insight you have provided using your specialist research and analytical skills. You will be responsible from running our global customer experience tracking programme, innovating and developing it to not only to fulfil the current needs of our business, but to direct and inform our future path. This role is ideal for someone looking for a client-side move after a successful agency career or for someone with sound consultative and project management skills honed in the client-side environment.

Main Activities and Responsibilities

• Oversee existing customer experience programme. Develop new customer insights initiatives in partnership with the business. Partner with our IT development colleagues to ensure our programme infrastructure is optimised. Work closely with our customer experience director to ensure that recommendations translate into business action
• Analyse customer trends on tracking studies, draw insights from across projects and multiple sources to tell the customer story and make strategic recommendations. This will involve manipulating and analysing large data sets
• Proactive and reactive scanning, analysis and dissemination of market intelligence and trends drawn from key data sources, press, and reports
• Pro-actively communicate research results into the business. Communicate insights in a compelling passionate manner, make recommendations that drive our business forward.
• Support business colleagues who wish to undertake research, providing advice on projects ensuring they adopt the most appropriate approach. Negotiate and agree research projects with colleagues as appropriate.
• Mentor and motivate other members of the team. Coach others in managing projects and suppliers. Advise others on most appropriate techniques. Seek out sources that can be used to develop members of the team.
• Ensure that there is high standard of rigour and analysis across projects, that we have a consistent approach to sign-posting results and measuring performance on a consistent manner. Propose, develop and share best practice with colleagues.
• Think strategically and act tactically to influence and grow the reputation of the customer insights team. Seek out and apply new research approaches that deepen our insight or make us more efficient.

Functional and Technical Competencies

• A creative and strategic thinker who is degree qualified.
• Very personable, with strong influencing skills that can be used to build partnerships with cross-functional teams.
• Self-starter with strong project management skills, able to balance multiple complex projects at once and work to tight deadlines.
• Good knowledge of statistics, able to explain the fundamentals to colleagues
• Ability to communicate effectively at all levels of the organisation and able to present insights in a compelling fashion. A perfect command of both written and oral English is a pre-requisite.
• Hard working, methodical and organised with strong attention to detail

Education, Knowledge, Skills and Experience

• Has a proven ability and expertise in insight generation that extends over a number of years in customer experience tracking (preferably with agency experience) with deep expertise in quantitative research. Ideally has a good knowledge of statistics (including regression, factor analysis, ANOVA).
• Experience designing and running research programs, executing web-based questionnaires, ConfirmIT experience particularly advantageous.
• Knowledge of the STM publishing industry advantageous. A keen interest in science.
• A good understanding and experience of Business-to-Business research.
• Experience managing staff.
• Excellent computer skills, particularly across the microsoft suite (including MS Access and SharePoint).
• Very comfortable preparing PowerPoint presentations. Sensitive to design and displaying complex information in a visually compelling manner.
• Expertise in SPSS and or R is advantageous and familiarity with HTML is helpful (much of our reporting is online).