The Group:  The Client Service function lives within the Global Sales and Client Service Unit and is responsible for two key client functions: Customer Success and Customer Support.  This role reports to the Chief Revenue Officer and drives strategy and execution with direction from stakeholders from Software, Data, Research and Investment Management business units.  

The Role: The Global Head of Client Service drives strategy and execution for both the Customer Success and Customer Support functions with a passion for optimizing complex business processes and embracing digital transformation to create a best in class customer experience.   Morningstar serves a diverse set of clients including individual investors and B2B clients in Asset Management, Wealth Management, Banking/Capital Markets and Fintech with a commitment to empowering investor success. These clients work with Morningstar for leading capabilities in investment research, investment data, software solutions, analytics, index solutions, investment management and other capabilities. The scope of the role includes Customer Success and Customer Support functions across all geographies including Americas, EMEA and APAC and across all product lines with a primary focus on our software, data and research business units. This leader will be responsible for evaluating current state operations and building a world-class operation with a focus on talent, process optimization, and technology all aimed at delivering an exceptional customer experience. This position is located in our Chicago office.

Overall Responsibilities:

• Keep the customer experience at the center of long term and short term strategy and execution.  
• Evaluate current state of client service functions and ongoing transformation programs and prioritize a set of high-impact initiatives that elevate our client service function. 
• Embrace and experiment with new technologies and innovative ways of working that drive operating efficiencies and deliver exceptional customer experience.    
• Listen to and work with the teams and clients to continuously ideate, simplify, build, and scale new and improved approaches to client service.  
• Ensure alignment of incentives to desired outcomes based on rigorous use of goals, KPIs and metrics.  
• Develop a high-performance culture anchored on customer centricity, urgency, grit, continuous improvement, and innovation.  
• Attract, develop and retain a world-class team of dynamic, client-centric service leaders with a strong focus on developing new talent that enter Morningstar through our Morningstar Development Program for university hires.  
• Expand upon and improve existing training and enablement programs to ensure a capable, effective and confident client service team. 
• Manage key operational and administrative responsibilities including budget management, reporting, forecasting, vendor management, etc. 

Customer Success Focus:

• Evaluate current customer success strategy and execution and develop a roadmap of near term and long term priorities to drive to desired outcomes. 
• Evaluate and improve key processes, role definitions, resource capacity, technologies and analytics that support the customer success activities of onboarding, training, adoption, expansion and renewals.  
• Build a consistent data-driven and metric-driven approach to measure customer health and to guide CSM’s to high value customer activity and engagement.   
• Continue to build on existing advocacy programs and events to improve adoption, retention and expansion.  
• Partner with products organization leaders to pro-actively incorporate customer suggestions in products roadmap.
• Build a regular operating cadence to monitor, measure and act on key KPIs and metrics to both manage the team to high performance and report out to key stakeholders.
• Partner with Sales, Implementation and Customer Support to ensure alignment of activities. 

Customer Support Focus:  

• Leverage an analytical and process-centric approach to transformation and continuous improvement.
• Continuously evaluate strategy, processes, technologies, resource capacity, and role definition across Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 support to optimize and improve the customer experience and outcomes.    
• Embrace a customer centric view of the end to end processes across all support channels and across the full life cycle of support: case intake, case management, case resolution, escalation and incident management.
• Evaluate opportunities to develop tiered or “platinum” service levels. 
• Build and implement a strategy for improved knowledge management for effective and efficient problem resolution.  
• Optimize deployment of support resources across local, onshore, nearshore and offshore centers to deliver desired client and operating outcomes. 
• Build a regular operating cadence to monitor, measure and act on key KPIs and metrics to both manage the team to high performance and report out to key stakeholders.
• Partner with Customer Success, Product and Sales to ensure alignment of activities and priorities. 

Requirements

• 15+ years of related executive experience in global customer success and customer support in a B2B technology and or financial services firm.   
• Superior people development and coaching skills. 
• Natural collaborator adept at building relationships across internal teams and with external clients and partners.  
• Highly effective at operating in a matrix organization. 
• Experience in implementing and managing leading, innovative technologies in the client service domain.  
• Proficiency with Salesforce.com, ServiceCloud, Tableau, and other leading client technologies. 
• Bachelor’s degree; MBA, CFA, or other advanced degree/accreditation is strongly preferred.