Visitor Experience and Operations Manager

Overview

The Design Museum is the world’s leading museum devoted to contemporary design in every form from furniture to graphics, and architecture to industrial design. The museum reopened in a fantastic new building in Kensington in 2016 and has since welcomed almost 1.5m visitors.

With approximately 60 Visitor Experience Assistants and over 60 Welcomer Volunteers, the Visitor Experience department is the largest team in the museum and is responsible for welcoming and engaging all visitors, supporting delivery of exhibitions, programmes and events and maximising income from ticket and membership sales and donations.

The Visitor Experience & Operations Manager is a visible and hands-on leader of the team of managers, assistants and volunteers in the department, able to anticipate visitor expectations and exceed these through ensuring the team are confident and highly motivated in their roles.

Job scope

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

They will work closely with curators, project managers, programmers, marketing and membership teams to ensure that the set-up and delivery of exhibitions and events fully meet internal and audience expectations.

Job description

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 & 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, 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.
• 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.
• Ensure all payroll, recharge, annual leave and associated processes are completed accurately and on time.
• Support the Head of Commercial to forecast and effectively manage the Visitor Experience staff budget.
• Manage departmental headcount and contracts and manage recruitment of assistants and volunteers.

Experience Management

• Model the behaviours and standards expected of all members of the team and ensure management processes are in place to deliver these in all roles.
• Ensure staff, volunteer and visitor feedback is proactively collated, responded to, addressed at relevant forums and that actions are agreed, prioritised and followed through.
• Deliver engagement and training initiatives across the team to improve the quality of the visit, utilising available training budgets and ensuring sufficient resource to enable training and line management meetings to take place.
• Lead on visitor accessibility and inclusion issues and seek to develop improvements to accessibility for visitors at the museum.
• Seek to improve the customer onsite ticket journey through continual evaluation and review of processes and staff interaction.

Operations

• Regularly review the duty management procedures and seek to improve efficiency, safety and visitor experience standards.
• Act as duty manager when required.
• 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.
• Manage the departmental expenditure budget relating to health and safety, equipment, contracts, volunteer expenses and cash handling.
• Work closely with other revenue-generating teams to evaluate, identify, develop and exploit commercial opportunities.
• Meet regularly with the manager of the catering operator, ensuring that agreed SLAs, including standards of presentation and customer service, are delivered in the public catering spaces.
• Ensure management, admin and operational support is provided to the retail team when required.

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.

Person Specification

Essential

Experience and Knowledge

• Delivering excellent customer service in a public-facing environment with practical experience of leading and motivating a team.
• Managing a complex rota and payroll procedure.
• Extensive Duty management experience including health and safety, security and cash handling responsibility in a public-facing environment.
• Meeting and exceeding income targets and motivating others to achieve these targets.
• Excellent computer skills including extensive use of Microsoft Office applications.

Skills and Abilities

• Able to enthuse, motivate and inspire others through excellent communication and strong interpersonal and advocacy skills.
• Understanding of how principles of diversity and accessibility apply to a public-facing organisation.
•    An excellent delegator and able to maximise the skills and experience of others to ensure efficient time management.
• Well-organised and skilled in prioritising a changing workload, and able to devise solutions to complex problems under pressure.
• A passion for exceeding visitor expectations and able to develop this culture in others.
• The willingness to learn about the importance of design in the world around us and be able to support research and training sessions on design knowledge and exhibition content.
• Experience of working with ticketing and/or point of sale systems.
• Experience of recruitment, line management and training.

Desirable experience or willingness to be trained

• Experience within the museums, galleries, heritage or cultural sector.
• Understanding of risk assessment processes, requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act, health and safety and licensing legislation.
• First Aid trained and experience of undertaking duty First Aider role.
•     Experience managing volunteers and an understanding of best practice in involving volunteers.

Terms and conditions

Salary: up to £35,000 per annum dependant on experience

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

Hours: full-time, 37.5 hours/5 days per week, including weekend working 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.

Closing Date: 21 June

Interviews:  to be held during w/c 26 June

Application process

For all the latest job vacancies at the Design Museum, please visit our Careers page to apply via our online portal. During the application process you will be asked to download an application form. The completed application form must be reuploaded onto your application. Please note we are not able to accept other forms of application for our job roles.

Design Museum Staff Benefits

Employees are entitled to 25 days holiday, rising to 26 days after two years’ service and 27 days after five years’ service, plus 8 days Bank Holiday and Christmas Eve (museum closed), pro-rata for part-time employees. Other benefits include access to a defined contribution pension scheme, an employee assistance programme, season ticket loan, cycle to work scheme, free entry for friends and family to the museum, a variety of staff discounts including the museum shop and free entry to a wide number of galleries and museums in London.

Pension

All eligible staff will have access to the Design Museum Defined Contribution Pension Scheme. An employees pay a minimum amount of 4% of their pensionable salary every month. On top of this payments are made into the employee’s pension by the museum of 4% of the employee’s pensionable salary. Total paid into an employee’s museum pension = 8%.

Hours of Work

Full-time employees are required to work no less than 37.5 hours per week and the standard working day is 9.30am – 6.00pm which includes a daily 1-hour break (30 minutes paid and 30 minutes unpaid). Hours for part-time employees are pro-rated accordingly.

Diversity and Inclusion

The museum pro-actively seeks to collaborate with institutional partners, individuals, and networks to realise its commitment to build a culturally diverse workforce. We positively encourage applications from underrepresented groups and consider candidates who are suitably qualified and eligible regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marital status, or pregnancy and maternity.