Service Delivery Manager - Contract

At VML, we are a beacon of innovation and growth in an ever-evolving world. Our heritage is built upon a century of combined expertise, where creativity meets technology, and diverse perspectives ignite inspiration. With the merger of VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson, we have forged a new path as a growth partner that is part creative agency, part consultancy, and part technology powerhouse.

Our global family now encompasses over 30,000 employees across 150+ offices in 64 markets, each contributing to a culture that values connection, belonging, and the power of differences. Our expertise spans the entire customer journey, offering deep insights in communications, commerce, consultancy, CRM, CX, data, production, and technology. We deliver end-to-end solutions that result in revolutionary work.

Service Delivery Manager required on a contract basis to join VML

This is a contract role and we require a Service Delivery Manager ideally with Commerce experience. This role may require travel to client site and on-call support.

The opportunity:

Service Delivery Manager is needed with proven experience in service delivery. The candidate should have a good technical understanding of web platforms and good grounding on how customers use our solutions to drive revenues and profits. This role is a combination of support management and team leadership, including liaison with internal technical teams and third parties.

You should be able to deal confidently with customers, manage and motivate a team of web engineers, plan workloads & priorities, interact with 3rd parties, analyse / plan workload, deal with hosting providers and help manage software releases & deployments. Additionally, you will be required to work within the support processes (reporting, SLA's, incident & problem management etc).

A flexible approach to working hours and a willingness to cover periods of on-call support is required for this role.

What you'll be doing:

• Co-ordinate & facilitate the contracted eCommerce service to one or more customers
• Ensure that escalations and communications are managed in line with documented contract standards
• Develop and maintain good customer relationships with the support of the Account Manager.
• Be the primary point of contact for the customer and ensure that the contracted scope of service is delivered to contracted SLA's and that levels of customer satisfaction remain high
• Ensure all agreed SLAs are met for incidents & service requests
• Develop and maintain a productive and close working relationship with relevant Account Executives
• Build appropriate working relationships with any third parties involved in the delivery of in-scope production services to the customer
• Produce weekly and monthly service reports for customers against the agreed targets, SLA's, KPI's, to agreed deadlines together with analysis and interpretation of service trends and recommendations to enable service improvements and cost-saving opportunities
• Conduct regular service reviews on a monthly/quarterly basis
• Liaise with customers to agree problem priorities and delivery
• Ensure changes, releases, patches or upgrades to customer production environments are managed effectively and in a timely manner through the change & release management process
• Ensure any interruptions to the live service are resolved quickly and that the underlying problem is identified and removed using Problem and Change Management processes
• Conduct Root Cause Analysis for all Severity 1 incidents, identifying & recommending opportunities for service improvement using Continuous Sustainable Improvement Plan (CSIP)
• Ensure Support Activities managed within contracted Support Budget
• Work with support and development teams to ensure problem fixes are planned into releases and delivered

What we want from you:

• Extensive experience in a Support function
• Working knowledge of ITIL v3 processes framework specifically Incident, Problem and Request Fulfilment
• The ideal candidate will have experience with commerce environments
• Extremely results-driven, will always go the extra mile to deliver expected results
• Financially aware and able to contribute to the effective running of the account.
• Clear & concise communication skills - both written and oral
• Proven track record in building and maintaining strong relationships with customers including working from customer sites when required
• Strong leadership skills with proven track record of managing, developing and leading multi-disciplined teams
• Strong problem solving, time management and organizational skills
• Experience of providing out of hours support for high severity incidents
• Exposure to "follow the sun" support models

If you know some of this, even better:

• Linux, Unix, Windows operating systems
• Exposure to software development environments
• Exposure to Java/J2EE and web technologies