Vendor Manager - AppleCare - Apple - Shanghai

Job description
The WW Vendor Management organisation of AppleCare is responsible for managing a portfolio of vendor partners, delivering outsourced technical T1, T2, voice, eMail and chat support to Apple's customers. The focus of this role will be managing partners supporting our customers in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong in Mandarin and Cantonese.

The Asia Pacific Vendor Management Team is looking is looking for a Vendor Manager reporting to the Partner Operations Manager, ensuring the highest levels of customer satisfaction, technical excellence, quality and consistency at a number of Vendor Partner sites in the region.

Key Qualifications

The successful candidate will demonstrate the following skills:
•Customer & Technical focus: address the customer impact of all activities while driving to ensure the highest possible technical abilities for advisors at our vendor partners. Demonstrate a
•Communication & Partnership: establish and maintain strong working relationships with Vendor Partners, CC Ops, Training, T2, CR and other internal teams to address cross-functional interdependencies, process alignment and improvement. Communicate concisely and clearly both orally and in written form; show courage and good judgement in addressing areas of conflict or ambiguity with a view to bosltering relationships and trust in the process.
•Results focused: meet commitments and drive closure of open actions. Provide regular status updates to stakeholders including Partner Operations Manager and Vendor Manager peers. Collaborate with QPM team to understand root causes of performance challenges and deliver concise direction to vendor site management. Question 'business as usual' as an appropriate status quo, and thrive on the challenge of change.
•Decision-making: make decisions in a timely manner, sometimes with incomplete information and with areas of ambiguity - under tight deadlines. Be open to developing a deep organisational knowledge and demonstrate a willingness to integrate multiple points of view into the decision making process; bring a rigorous understanding of data to the process, and have the courage to stand your ground and the flexibility to accept a differing outcome from your first choice as something you can give your fullest support to.
•Strong project management skills: accurately scope out length and difficulty of tasks and projects. Set objectives and goals for yourself that support the success of your sites. Anticipate and adjust for problems and roadblocks - and be an active communicator in flagging those to all concerned. Measure performance against goals. Evaluate results and hold yourself and others accountable.
• Fluency in Mandarin (essential) and Cantonese (desirable) as well as exceptional verbal and written English expression.
Leadership Palette Attributes
Cultural Tenacity
Obsess over the customer experience.
Fight For Excellence.
Demonstrate integrity.
Uncommon Sense
See around corners.
Focus and simplify.
Imaginative Intelligence
Demand difference.
Approach problems flexibly.
Accountability Without Control
Own the hard calls.
Listen, challenge and commit.
Capacity To Connect
Know people.
Foster trust.
Give help.
Seek expertise and experience.
Team Catalyst
Make action meaningful.
Experience & Education
University degree or equivalent desirable.
Extensive contact centre experience of four years or more essential.
COPC CoOrdinator Certification Desirable; understanding of COPC concepts essential.
Fluency in English essential. Fluency in Thai desirable. Fluency in Mandarin or Cantonese an advantage.
Contact Centre operational or quality management experience of two years or more essential.
Experience in the management of outsourced suppliers delivering customer facing support for at least three years desirable - either on the customer or partner side.
Experience in the management of quality and consistency of OEM technical support, with a proven understanding of the interdependencies of those dimensions.
Experience working as part of a virtual team that is geographically dispersed.
Proven ability to collaborate with regional partners.

Description

In the role you will create and manage business relationships with our vendor partners to implement support solutions for our customers. You will be responsible for partner performance against defined metrics across multiple sites in APAC.

You will communicate and gain agreement on mutual goals and objectives and build awareness and support of overall strategic benefits of the alliance. You will maintain a collaborative dialogue with the Partner Operations Manager & vendor manager peers to review the effectiveness of the overall relationship, specific lines of business, site management and structure.

The role provides for feedback to the Partner Operations Manager in reviewing the overall performance and strength of vendor partners you are responsible for. This in turn will enable the team to assess the landscape of all partners in the region with a view to understanding cost, quality, best practise and scaleability across the partner portfolio.

To succeed you will need to work collaboratively with both internal and external stakeholders to identify and implement initiatives to improve productivity and quality; engage as a leader to drive a results-oriented Root Cause Analysis problem-solving approach to quality improvement with the QPM team.

You will identify, own and foster relationships within the broader AppleCare organisation with particular focus on upstream escalation groups including Customer Relations, Tier 2 and Engineering, forecasting and capacity planning groups, training and quality groups and AppleCare Field Service Managers for the countries your partners support. You will build closer relationships between our vendor partners, internal support sites and other groups that impact the overall customer experience with Apple. You will actively partner with CC operations, training, reporting & analysis and the broader WW VM team.

Being on site with our partners is key to your success, and you will be required to travel both in support of routine operations and special systems, tools, and product launch support on a routine basis.

Success in the role will be determined by:
•delivering results at or above target at partner sites across the WW Contact Centre key metrics including Customer Satisfaction, AHT, Service Level & APP Sales
•ensuring readiness at vendor sites that delivers the required resources, appropriately trained and available for calls in line with WW and regional planning
•strong, collaborative communication and partnership with vendor partners, internal stakeholders and AppleCare country management
•a willing and active participation in the global team to drive consistencies and share or adopt best practises

Enter your email address:

Pass it on for Referral Bonus. Not the right role for you, but know someone we should meet? Share with him to earn $1,000 referral bonus.