Job Description

At Honda we embrace inclusion in our various policies, so whilst our contracts state that the hours are as required to fulfil the role with a minimum of 35 hours per week, we offer flexibility for when you work. The regular office hours are 08:00 – 16:00 Monday to Thursday with a half hour lunch break & 08:00 – 13:00 on a Friday. However, we offer flexibility of when you work with our daily flex-time start of between 07:00 and 11:00 providing that there is no business requirement.

Whilst there is no contractual right to work from home, the flexibility we offer is that you can request to work from home 2 days per week, again providing there is no business requirement to attend the office.

Role:
Honda is embracing digital technology to transform the way we do business across all of our product lines. From handling prospects and leads to enabling online purchasing of battery electric vehicles, the way we do business is evolving rapidly.

As a Service Specialist, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring the successful management, optimisation, and alignment of Honda's Salesforce, and other Digital Retail and Mobile platforms with the organisation's service-oriented goals and objectives.

Your primary responsibility will be managing third party service providers ensuring that they meet the evolving needs of the business and deliver an exceptional customer experience. As the applications integrate with other Honda systems you will also work closely with colleagues from across the Information Services Department (ISD) organisation. The services being managed have an annual budget of several million pounds.

The role ensures full compliance with Honda’s policies and procedures to ensure strong governance is in place in relation to applications including performance and security monitoring.

Continuous review of our processes to improve both accuracy and efficiency as well as management insight and full transparency.

Main Responisibilities:

Business Support

• Support business activities by assisting with and/or advising on usage of Digital and Mobile services.
• Support business improvement by monitoring industry trends and other OEM activities.
• Maintain end-to-end functional knowledge of application systems and processes.
• Ensure application documentation is available/maintained by internal and external providers.

Operational Delivery

• Stay up to date with the latest platform features and work with business colleagues to identify opportunities for process improvement and automation.
• Assist business with documenting requirements for changes and enhancements.
• Control/validation of proposals/estimates from external service providers on Change Requests.
• Prioritise the changes with the business and co-ordinate with the suppliers to get them delivered, tested, and deployed to the live environment.
• Act as the gatekeeper to the production environment, ensuring conformance to policies and operational processes/procedures.
• Work with third party Service Providers to plan and execute system upgrades in conjunction with the wider ISD support organisation.

Service Provider Management

• Act as a contact person and escalation point for and towards the external Service Providers delivering and managing the service.
• Monitor that the outsourced services are provided within the agreed SLAs and KPIs and supports improvement actions.
• Ensure security/threat evaluations are performed regularly and countermeasures implemented in a timely manner.
• Ensure that processes which are negatively affecting customer satisfaction and relationships are evaluated and improved.
• Act as trusted advisor towards IS Management in understanding and explaining complex issues relating to service providers.

Incident/Problem Management

• Co-ordinate the resolution of issues across the providers in a timely manner.
• Support critical incident management (CIM) by facilitating discussions until problem resolution.
• View comments in online forums and addressing issues found there.
• Collaborate with other internal and external stakeholders to review recurring issues/incidents and identify root causes.

Qualifications, skills and experience:

Required

• Experience working in an application support or application development team.
• Experience of working in a consumer-facing digital environment
• Ability to develop and maintain strong working relationships with colleagues at different levels of the business and the ISD division, up through the most senior levels within Honda.
• Ability to establish and maintain a high level of trust and confidence in both the business and IT communities.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly communicate vision, mission, goals and themes to both business and IT audiences.

Desirable

• Knowledge of one or more of; Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Salesforce, MuleSoft, Connected Vehicles, Mobile Apps
• Willing to travel occasionally within Europe.
• Experience in application and system technology security testing.
• Project management skills and experience in creating and managing project plans.
• Knowledge of Microsoft Azure.
• Knowledge of JIRA
• Knowledge of monitoring tools such as DataDog
• Demonstrated ability in managing operational budgets.

Honda is committed to the principle of equal opportunity in the workplace for all employees, temporary workers, contractors, applicants and visitors. Honda also encourages respect for the individual differences and talents of others while making full use of one's own abilities, based on Honda's philosophy of respect for the individual.

At Honda, we value and celebrate diversity and are committed to being a fair, non-discriminatory company that promotes and welcomes the uniqueness and differences of people around the world. We recognise that a diverse workforce allows for different ideas and perspectives, and we encourage everyone to share them. We strive to foster a culture of belonging that is consistent with Honda's core values and lived out in the way we work and respect each other. For us at Honda, diversifying our workforce means increasing its overall strength by providing people with equal opportunities - regardless of personal characteristics or previous careers.

This commitment flows directly from the Honda philosophy and the belief that we are all working towards a common goal. Honda recruits, hires, trains and promotes the most qualified/experienced individuals at all levels without regard to race, origin, religion or belief, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or any other protected characteristic.