Director of Customer Experience - #2184717

We’re looking for a strategic, customer-focused and commercially aware Director of Customer Experience to lead our Account Management, Application Support and Customer Success teams.

You’ll be accountable for delivering a consistently excellent customer experience across the full post-sale lifecycle, from onboarding and ongoing success through to technical support and account growth. You’ll drive improvements in Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) through proactive engagement, effective issue resolution and close partnership with Sales and Product Engineering.

A key priority will be establishing our Customer Success function by transitioning the existing Hypercare team from Application Support into a distinct, proactive team. Working with the Board, Sales & Marketing and Product Engineering, you’ll own our retention strategy and address the underlying product and service issues that drive customer churn.

Core Responsibilities:

Team Leadership & Customer Success

• Lead and develop the Account Management, Application Support and Customer Success teams, creating a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.
• Establish Customer Success as a distinct, proactive function by transitioning the existing Hypercare team from Application Support.
• Define clear goals, operating practices, customer health scoring and proactive engagement cadences for the Customer Success team.
• Coach managers and team leaders, building high-performing teams and delivering results through their leadership.
• Own a structured onboarding and adoption programme that helps customers achieve agreed security outcomes. Establish joint success plans, clear onboarding milestones and measures of time-to-value, product adoption and value realised, using these insights to identify barriers and strengthen retention.
• Maintain a consistently excellent customer experience across onboarding, ongoing success, technical support and account growth.

Customer Retention & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Own and execute the customer retention strategy, working closely with the Board, Sales & Marketing and Product Engineering to improve GRR and NRR.
• Identify at-risk accounts, understand the causes of churn and coordinate proactive interventions across teams.
• Work with Product Engineering to ensure customer pain points, recurring product and service issues, and feature requests are understood, prioritised and addressed.
• Establish a disciplined renewal planning and forecasting process with Sales and Finance, with clear responsibilities for account planning, commercial negotiations, expansion opportunities and risk mitigation. Maintain a consolidated view of renewal readiness, forecast retention and revenue at risk, and report progress and interventions to the Board.
• Partner with Sales to support renewal and expansion conversations with data-driven insight into customer health, needs and opportunities.
• Build executive relationships with strategic customers and establish regular business reviews that demonstrate progress against agreed outcomes and the value of their investment. Develop relationships across security, engineering and commercial stakeholders to maintain alignment and reduce reliance on a single customer contact.
• Connect customer outcomes to revenue performance, balancing retention, expansion and long-term customer value.

Service Excellence & Voice of the Customer

• Act as the senior escalation point for customer complaints and complex issues, ensuring timely and fair resolution.
• Feed systemic problems back to Product Engineering and the wider business, so that resolutions address underlying causes as well as individual cases.
• Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) across all three teams, establish consistent processes and service-level agreements (SLAs), and drive continuous improvement in responsiveness, first-contact resolution and customer satisfaction.
• Bring together insight from support tickets, account reviews, Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT) feedback and churn analysis to identify trends, risks and opportunities.
• Represent the voice of the customer at leadership level, turning data and feedback into clear recommendations and coordinated action.

Qualifications & Experience:

Essential

• 5+ years’ experience leading customer-facing teams in Account Management, Customer Success or Support within B2B SaaS or enterprise software.
• Experience of talking technical-to-business with commercial leads and Directors.
• A proven track record of improving customer retention metrics, including NRR and/or GRR.
• Experience building or transforming a Customer Success function, including defining operating models, customer health scoring and proactive engagement cadences.
• Experience managing managers and leading through team leaders, rather than solely through individual contributors.
• Experience acting as a senior escalation point for customer complaints and resolving complex issues.
• Experience working cross-functionally with Product and Engineering teams to translate customer pain points into product improvements.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to combine data and narrative to drive action and decision-making with internal and external stakeholders and the Board.
• Demonstrable ability to define and track customer health KPIs, SLAs and retention metrics.
• Experience with CRM and customer success tools such as Salesforce, Gainsight, HubSpot or equivalent.
• A strong understanding of the post-sale customer lifecycle in a subscription or SaaS business model.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word.

Desirable

• Experience in cybersecurity or another technical product domain.
• Experience working with large enterprise and mid-market customers in a B2B SaaS context.
• Experience working with reseller or channel partner networks and managing indirect customer relationships.
• Experience working in an Agile environment and familiarity with how Product Engineering teams operate.
• An understanding of vulnerability management, dynamic or static application security testing (DAST/SAST), or security operations sufficient to understand customer needs and triage technical escalations effectively.
• Familiarity with Atlassian Jira and Confluence for cross-functional collaboration.
• Knowledge of NPS and CSAT survey design and analysis.
• An understanding of compliance frameworks, including ISO 27001, SOC 2 and GDPR, as they relate to customer assurance requirements.
• A recognised qualification in Customer Success, Account Management or Service Management, such as CCXP or ITIL.
• Management or leadership qualifications, or formal coaching certifications.

Who We’re Looking For:

We’re looking for a customer-obsessed leader who understands customer needs, empathises with their frustrations and is relentless in improving their experience. You’ll combine that commitment with commercial awareness, connecting customer outcomes to retention, expansion and lifetime value.

You’ll be comfortable coaching managers and motivating people to improve processes, culture and outcomes. You’ll stay calm under pressure, de-escalate difficult situations, represent the business credibly to frustrated customers and make sound decisions quickly.

This is a role for someone who builds strong relationships across functions, particularly with Product Engineering, and can influence without authority to get customer issues prioritised. We want someone who takes ownership of positive change and brings others with them.

You’ll need to demonstrate the personal attributes and essential criteria above, alongside some of the desirable criteria. These will be assessed through CV screening, competency-based interviews and a presentation to the Board of Directors.

Location & Hybrid Working:

Our office is based in Leeds, and this role will operate on a hybrid basis. The number of days in the office per week is flexible depending on commuting distance, however working days in the office will be required without the need for overnight stays.

Additional Info:

As part of our commitment to information security and our ISO 27001 accreditation, please note that upon acceptance of an employment offer with AppCheck, you will undergo pre-employment checks including criminal record (DBS), employment & references as well as verification of Right to Work in the UK.

Please apply ASAP as interviews may commence before the closing date, and the vacancy may close early without warning.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity.