About Kudos

An exciting opportunity to join a small but rapidly expanding team focused on providing an innovative online service for academic researchers, institutions, publishers, societies and funders.

Kudos helps broaden the reach and impact of published works. This multi-award-winning service has a global client base, including major publishers such as Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE, and 125,000 users in the research community.

About this role

Kudos has over 75 publisher clients and growing numbers of clients in other areas. You will be responsible for client servicing and satisfaction, and for a sizeable renewals budget. You will be a people person, and a self-starting problem solver, comfortable with both defining overall client strategy, and with supporting clients’ every day needs. You will be passionate and productive, experienced at juggling priorities, and creative in your approach to ensuring that clients derive value from our data and services.

Job Purpose

You will lead our client management team and ensure that we provide the highest levels of client servicing, by:

• Developing strong customer relationships with your own clients
• Line managing one account manager and providing guidance in the management of those clients
• Identifying and ensuring conversion of upsell opportunities across the full client base
• Liaising with internal colleagues to report, explore and resolve client issues and propose / scope enhancements
• Supporting and contributing to the development of sales, product and marketing strategy
• Creating / collating regular reports and analysis
• Advising the Kudos leadership team on the health of our client base, and ensuring that clients’ needs are recognized and addressed at leadership level.

Reports to

Sales & Marketing Director

Key duties and responsibilities

Lead and manage the client servicing team

• Organize regular meetings, reporting, resource planning, appraisals
• Develop best practice in client servicing (communications, reporting / analysis, troubleshooting, renewal, etc) and ensure buy-in and application of this by colleagues both within and beyond the team
• Forecast, track, analyse and report on key account metrics (internally and to clients)
• Devise and implement processes for measuring, tracking, reporting on and risk-managing (qualitative) client satisfaction
• Proactively assess, clarify and validate customer needs on an ongoing basis, and ensure these are recognized and addressed by the wider Kudos team
• Support clients during pilots to develop new products / partnerships
• Oversee the provision of end user support and assist in troubleshooting, prioritizing of fixes / enhancements and reporting
• Ensure relevant documentation is kept up-to-date and stored centrally
• Keep up to date with market trends and competitor activities.

Plan and execute strategy to ensure maximum client retention (in line with annually agreed revenue targets)

• Provide strategic oversight for all clients including commercial decisions, problem solving, maximizing value derived by customers, seeking and developing client development opportunities

Establish productive, professional relationships with key personnel in assigned customer accounts

• Write and execute client development plans for key client relationships
• Manage configuration and ongoing support for clients’ implementation of Kudos, including training for clients and their users
• Respond in a timely and professional manner to client communications or queries, and own the troubleshooting and resolution of any client issues, with support as required from colleagues
• Regularly organise and take part in phone or in-person meetings, including workshops, webinars and similar
• Communicate clearly the progress of company initiatives to assigned customer accounts
• Use the Kudos system, SalesForce, Google Analytics and other data sources to store all relevant data and to provide reports

Dimensions/Territory/Scope/Scale

Global for all customer groups including end users, publisher, institutional, funder, industry and others across all Kudos products. The role is based in the main Kudos offices in Wheatley, Oxford, UK. Evening / weekend work and travel may be required on occasion.

Qualifications

Essential

• Experience in delivering client-focused solutions based on customer needs and commercial objectives
• Scholarly publishing experience
• Account management experience
• Demonstrated ability to communicate, present and influence credibly and effectively at all levels of the organization
• Well organized, meticulous and result driven
• Proven ability to work independently, prioritize effectively and meet deadlines
• Excellent verbal and written communications skills
• BA/BS degree or equivalent
• Confidence, ambition and self-motivation
• Computer and web literacy including Word, PowerPoint and Excel
• Ability to travel

Desirable

• Line management experience
• Familiarity with Salesforce or similar systems

Direct reports

1 x Account Manager

Application

To apply, please send your CV together with a covering letter outlining why you’re right for this role, to: Charlie Rapple, Sales & Marketing Director, charlie.a.rapple@growkudos.com.

This position has now closed.