A hands-on senior role that sets the strategy for customer service across every Tala channel, runs our AI agents, and trains the team to do better and be better.
About Tala
Tala is a British lighting company, founded in 2015 by three friends from Edinburgh University and now headquartered in London. We design premium LED bulbs, fixtures and lamps in London and make them with long-standing manufacturing partners. We're a certified B Corp.
Our mission: to create lighting of enduring quality, rooted in British design excellence and made for healthier living.
We're omnichannel, selling direct to consumers and B2B: direct customers buying on our websites in the UK, Europe and the US; designers and architects in Tala Pro, our trade programme; major retailers in the UK and US; and bespoke partnership clients. Growing B2B (trade, retail and partnerships) is a priority. We have around 400 products, three trading entities (UK, EU and US), and three warehouses in Milton Keynes, the Netherlands and Charlotte, North Carolina.
We're a small team that builds systems before adding people. Our stack is Gorgias, Shopify, NetSuite, AfterShip and Claude, and we use AI every day.
The role
Customer service sees more of our customers than any other team. It hears every delivery problem, product question and missed promise first. We're omnichannel and pushing hard on B2B, and we want customer service to be one of the strongest commercial voices in the business. You'll own customer service end to end: the strategy and standards, the inbox, escalations, the AI and improvement projects, and the customer experience across Tala. You're also the escalation point for every customer.
- Reports to: Head of Operations
- You lead: our global customer service team
- You work closely with: logistics, supply chain, product, sales and marketing, and you hold them to account for fixing what customers tell us
- Location: UK, hybrid, ideally 2 days a week in our London office
- Hours: 40 hours per week, 9am to 6pm UK time
- Language: excellent written and spoken English
How you'll work
- Hands-on and strategic. You set the strategy for customer service and make the big calls, and you do the work yourself. You'll be in the inbox, the data and the systems, not managing from a distance.
- A builder. You build systems before you add people. You're at home in our systems every day and technical enough to work in code at a high level: SQL, APIs, scripts and helpdesk rules, using AI to build and fix things.
- The AI strategy is yours. You own the AI strategy for customer service. You run our AI agents day to day, review the work of the agents and the team, and train the team to do better and be better.
What you'll own
Strategy and standards
- Own the strategic direction for customer service, and set the service standards for every channel: email, phone, chat and social.
- Make sure no customer has to chase us, and that every promise we make gets kept.
- Plan staffing and cover across UK and US hours.
Omnichannel and B2B
- Run one customer service across every channel and customer, D2C and B2B: direct customers, Tala Pro trade members, retail partners and partnership clients.
- Drive B2B: give trade and retail customers account-level service, convert trade enquiries, and grow the revenue customer service brings in, from add-on sales to new trade accounts.
The inbox and escalations
- Own the inbox: routing, priorities, cover for absences, and a daily plan the team works to.
- Be the escalation point for every customer, from direct customers to trade and retail partners and warranty claims. Pick up the phone, de-escalate, and drive each issue to a real solution.
AI strategy and agents
- Own the AI strategy for customer service: decide which contacts AI agents handle, and build, run and tune them every day.
- Review what the agents send, fix their knowledge and rules, and grow the share of contacts they resolve well. Prove it with numbers.
- Run a pipeline of improvements from idea to live, each with before-and-after numbers.
- Fix the processes that create contacts in the first place, rather than absorbing them.
Voice of the customer
- Own customer feedback, and issues with orders, stock and products.
- Trace problems to their root cause with logistics, supply chain and product, and report trends every week so other teams act on them.
Customer experience across the business
- Project-manage the end-to-end customer experience: order updates, delivery, returns and claims.
- Work with marketing and product so what we promise matches what we deliver.
Coaching and quality
- Review the work of the team and the AI agents every day, and give clear feedback.
- Train the team to do better and be better, with regular coaching and training sessions built on real tickets.
- Hire and develop the team, and set clear weekly KPIs.
Your first 30 days
We move fast. In your first 30 days we expect you to:
- Work the inbox alongside the team and map the top reasons customers contact us.
- Set the baseline for chase rate, first reply, resolution time, CSAT, contact rate and AI resolution.
- Write the customer service strategy and an improvement roadmap covering the top five contact drivers, how each gets fixed, and the AI agent plan.
- Have your first AI improvement live, with before-and-after numbers.
- Bring the chase rate below 5%.
- Run a weekly quality review of the team and the AI agents, and start a weekly voice-of-the-customer report that other teams act on.
What you'll bring
- 3+ years as a customer service manager or in a similar role, leading a team, ideally at an omnichannel premium brand, looking after trade and retail accounts as well as consumers.
- You've set a customer service strategy and delivered it yourself, hands-on.
- You've run AI agents in customer service (Gorgias, Zendesk, Intercom or similar): reviewed what they send, fixed their knowledge and rules, and measured them by resolution and deflection.
- You've coached a team to measurably better quality, through regular reviews and training.
- You're a builder. You've built tools, automations or workflows yourself, not just specified them, and you can show us one.
- Technical and at home in systems: a helpdesk, Shopify and an ERP such as NetSuite. Comfortable with APIs, SQL and simple scripts, and you can read and write code at a high level with AI.
- You run customer service by the numbers, and you can explain what drives each one.
- You've delivered improvement projects across teams, from spec to rollout.
- Excellent written and spoken English. You can de-escalate an upset customer by phone or email, then drive the issue through to a real solution.
- You've led a remote team across time zones.
Nice to have:
lighting, homeware or design; trade or B2B customer service; customer operations for retail partners; a quality-checking framework you've built.
How we'll measure success
- Customers chasing us: below 5%.
- First reply and resolution time on every channel.
- CSAT, and quality scores from your reviews of the team and the AI agents.
- Contacts per order, and the share resolved by AI or self-service.
- Revenue from customer service, including B2B and trade conversion.
- Customer issues fixed at source with other teams.
- Cost to serve per order.
- Take risks. Bold ideas shape the future of lighting, safe ones don't.
- Innovate. Use technology for real benefit, not for novelty.
- Best idea wins. Decisions backed by insight, not ego, regardless of department or seniority.
- Love it. Led by instinct and authenticity. If we love the idea, it will resonate.
- Build + learn. If a challenge calls for it, learn the skill and go for it, creative or technical.
Process
A 15-minute intro call, a 1-hour formal interview including a task based on real Tala tickets, then a final 30-minute culture interview.
Salary and benefits
- £40,000 to £55,000 per year, depending on experience
- 25 days holiday plus one wellness day
- Welcome Tala gift and generous staff discounts
- Career progression within a high-growth start-up
- Work within a passionate team dedicated to design and sustainability
- Opportunity to represent a leading brand in the lighting industry
#J-18808-Ljbffr