Visitor Experience and Operations Manager

Overview

We are looking for a confident and highly motivated Visitor Experience and Operations Manager who enjoys leading and coaching a visitor experience team to deliver an exceptional welcome and effective operations.

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Job scope

The Visitor Experience & Operations Manager is instrumental in working across the museum to plan and deliver staffing requirements. The role ensures an excellent welcome and high standards of customer service are delivered across the team, and that income from visitors is maximised.

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Job description

*The complete job description/person specification is available to download from our careers portal vacancy listing.

People management & leadership

• Lead, inspire and develop the team of managers, assistants and volunteers in delivering exceptional standards of welcome, service and sales skills.
• Ensure the Deputy Visitor Experience Manager and Ticketing and Insight Manager are fully skilled and supported in their roles and in the wider performance management, individual coaching and skills development of their teams.
• A key point of contact for stakeholders across the museum for planning and delivering visitor-facing programmes and events, the set-up of exhibitions and ensuring that the needs and expectations of visitors are fully considered and delivered.

Resource management

• Responsible for planning duty management rotas in line with budget and relevant museum activity.
• Ensure effective staff planning and deployment to maintain optimal cover across all visitor touchpoints, balancing operational needs, wellbeing, and budget efficiency.
• Liaise with key internal departments on all aspects of planning visitor-facing activity, ensuring that staffing levels, event plans and budget controls are fully agreed.

Experience management

• Model the behaviours and standards expected of all members of the team and ensure management processes are in place to deliver these.
• Ensure feedback is proactively collated, responded to, addressed at relevant forums and that actions are agreed, prioritised and followed through.
• Lead on visitor accessibility and inclusion issues and seek to develop improvements to accessibility for visitors at the museum.

Operations

• Regularly review the duty management procedures and seek to improve efficiency, safety and visitor experience standards.
• Attend exhibition and event project management, forward planning and evaluation meetings. To be the visitor champion at these meetings and ensure that visitor expectations and needs are discussed and met.

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Person specification

Essential

Experience and Knowledge

• Experience of delivering service excellent in a public-facing environment with practical experience of leading and motivating a team to achieve income targets.
• Experience of managing a complex rota and payroll procedure.
• Extensive duty management experience including health and safety, security, cash and data handling responsibility in a public-facing environment.

Skills and abilities

• Well-organised, skilled at prioritising workload who is able to maximise the skills and experience of others to ensure efficient time management.
• Able to devise solutions to complex problems under pressure.
• Motivated to deliver an exceptional visitor experience and able to develop this culture in others

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Salary: up to £38,010 per annum, dependent on experience

Holidays: 25 days per annum + christmas eve (museum closed)

Hours: 35 hours/5 days per week, including weekends, evenings and bank holidays on a rota basis.

Location: This role is based on-site at the museum, but there will be times when it may be appropriate for the post-holder to work from home, and this will be agreed in advance on an ad hoc basis.

Special demands of the role: The museum is a seven-day operation and regularly hosts events outside the core hours. Flexibility to work and travel at weekends, on public holidays and before/after core public hours is therefore essential.

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Closing Date: Sunday 09 November (midnight)

Interviews: Wednesday 12 November onwards

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Application process

For all the latest job vacancies at the Design Museum, please visit our Careers page to apply via our online portal: [https://careers.designmuseum.org/vacancies]

If you encounter any issues while completing your application, please email peopleteam@designmuseum.org before the vacancy closing date. We will be in touch as soon as possible; (please note the inbox is monitored Monday-Friday).