Location: Gurgaon
Function: Customer Experience / Shared Services / Global Capability Centre
Reporting To: Head of Operations
About the Role:
We are looking for a transformational Complaints Manager to build and lead a proactive, customer-focused complaints function that goes beyond simply resolving customer issues.
This role is responsible for ensuring that complaints are treated as a priority, managed with urgency and ownership, and used as a key source of insight to improve the overall customer experience.
The Complaints Manager will work closely with the Customer Experience Manager and Continuous Improvement Manager to identify complaint trends, understand root causes, strengthen processes, improve frontline capability and reduce repeat complaints, escalations and Ombudsman cases.
The objective is simple:
Prevent complaints wherever possible. When a complaint does occur, make sure it is handled exceptionally well, resolved fairly and does not happen again.
This is not a traditional complaints-handling role. We are looking for someone who can create a culture where teams take ownership of customer issues at the first point of contact, challenge poor processes and continuously raise the standard of complaint resolution.
Key Responsibilities:
1. Complaints Leadership & Governance
- Build and lead a best-in-class Complaints function focused on timely, fair and effective customer resolution.
- Establish clear complaints standards, governance frameworks, ownership models and escalation processes.
- Ensure complaints are treated with the appropriate priority and are managed within agreed regulatory, contractual and internal timeframes.
- Create a consistent approach to complaint investigation, communication, resolution and closure.
- Ensure every complaint has clear ownership from initial receipt through to final resolution.
- Monitor complaint volumes, ageing, themes, outcomes, repeat complaints and escalations.
- Establish strong governance around senior complaints and high-risk customer cases.
2. First-Contact Complaint Prevention
- Drive a culture of “prevent the complaint before it happens.”
- Work with operational leaders to identify the behaviours, processes and service failures that create avoidable complaints.
- Identify opportunities for frontline teams to resolve customer concerns before they become formal complaints.
- Develop clear guidance and coaching for teams on handling dissatisfaction, difficult conversations and early-stage complaints.
- Identify recurring failure points within the customer journey and ensure corrective actions are implemented.
- Promote ownership at first point of contact rather than unnecessary transfers, callbacks or escalations.
3. Complaint Resolution & Customer Advocacy
- Ensure complaints are investigated thoroughly, objectively and fairly.
- Ensure customers receive clear, accurate and empathetic communication throughout the complaint journey.
- Challenge teams where the proposed resolution does not appropriately address the customer's concern.
- Ensure root cause is understood before a complaint is closed.
- Identify vulnerable, high-risk or complex complaints requiring additional oversight.
- Ensure appropriate escalation is managed before matters progress externally.
- Maintain strong focus on preventing avoidable Ombudsman referrals and external escalations.
4. Root Cause & Continuous Improvement
- Partner closely with the CX Manager to identify the root causes behind complaints.
- Analyse complaint data to identify recurring process, product, system, training and behavioural issues.
- Turn complaint insights into measurable improvement initiatives.
- Track corrective actions through to completion and validate whether the change has reduced complaints.
- Identify repeat complaints and systemic issues requiring immediate intervention.
- Work with process owners to challenge ineffective processes and improve the end-to-end customer journey.
- Ensure lessons learned from complaints are shared across relevant teams.
5. Customer Experience Partnership
- Work closely with the Customer Experience Manager to understand how complaints are impacting the overall customer journey and brand experience.
- Use complaints as a key Voice of the Customer (VOC) source.
- Provide leadership with clear insight into customer sentiment, emerging issues and areas of risk.
- Contribute to CX strategy by highlighting customer pain points and opportunities for experience improvement.
- Support the development of customer-centric policies, processes and service standards.
- Ensure complaint insights influence wider customer experience decisions.
6. Team Leadership & Capability
- Lead, develop and inspire a high-performing complaints team.
- Establish a culture of accountability, ownership, empathy and customer advocacy.
- Ensure complaints colleagues have the knowledge, confidence and authority required to resolve customer issues effectively.
- Develop coaching and capability programmes based on complaint trends and quality findings.
- Drive consistent quality across complaint investigations and customer communications.
- Set clear performance expectations and hold the team accountable for complaint outcomes.
- Identify opportunities to improve collaboration between Complaints, Operations, Quality, Training, CX and Continuous Improvement teams.
7. Operational Excellence & Reporting
- Develop and maintain complaints dashboards and management information.
- Track key measures including:
1. Complaint volumes 2. Complaint ageing 3. Resolution times 4. Repeat complaints 5. Escalation rates 6. Ombudsman referrals 7. Root causes 8. Customer outcomes 9. Complaint upheld/not upheld trends 10. Corrective action completion
- Identify emerging risks and escalate them to leadership proactively.
- Provide regular executive-level reporting on complaint performance, trends, risks and improvement actions.
- Use data and customer insight to prioritise improvement activity.
- Ensure complaint records and supporting evidence are accurate, complete and audit-ready.
Must Have:
- Significant experience in Complaints, Customer Experience, Customer Operations, Service Recovery or a related customer-facing function.
- Proven experience leading or managing a complaints function within a customer-centric organisation.
- Strong understanding of complaint investigation, resolution, escalation and governance.
- Demonstrated ability to identify root causes and translate customer complaints into meaningful improvements.
- Experience working with senior stakeholders across Operations, CX, Quality, Training and Continuous Improvement.
- Strong analytical skills with the ability to interpret complaint data and identify trends.
- Strong understanding of customer outcomes and service recovery.
- Experience managing complex, sensitive or escalated customer complaints.
- Strong leadership and people-development experience.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.What We Are Looking For:
- A leader who genuinely sees complaints as opportunities to improve the customer experience.
- Someone who does not measure success simply by how many complaints are closed, but by how many complaints are prevented.
- Exceptional ownership and accountability.
- Strong judgement and the confidence to challenge decisions when the customer outcome is not right.
- A calm, empathetic and commercially aware approach to difficult customer situations.
- Someone who can move between detailed case management and strategic leadership.
- Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills.
- A data-driven thinker who can turn customer feedback into action.
- Someone who continuously challenges “this is how we've always done it.”
- A leader capable of building a culture where teams take responsibility for customer outcomes rather than passing complaints between departments.
What we are NOT looking for:
- Someone who sees complaints purely as cases to be closed.
- Someone focused only on meeting complaint SLAs without considering the quality of the customer outcome.
- Someone who simply escalates difficult complaints rather than taking ownership.
- Someone who treats complaints as an isolated Complaints Team responsibility.
- Someone who identifies problems but does not drive the organisation towards fixing them.
- Someone who focuses on reducing reported complaints without addressing the underlying customer experience issues.Success in This Role Looks Like
- A measurable reduction in avoidable complaints.
- Fewer repeat complaints and recurring customer issues.
- Reduced internal and external escalations.
- Reduced Ombudsman referrals and cases.
- Faster and more effective complaint resolution.
- Improved quality and consistency of complaint investigations.
- Stronger ownership of customer issues at first point of contact.
- Clear identification and elimination of systemic complaint drivers.
- Complaint insights consistently feeding into CX and Continuous Improvement programmes.
- A culture where teams actively look for ways to prevent customer dissatisfaction before it becomes a complaint.
- Customers feeling heard, respected and fairly treated when things go wrong.
- A complaints function recognised as a strategic customer experience function, rather than simply a back-office resolution team.
The Ultimate Objective
Make complaints the exception, not the norm.
Where a complaint does occur, ensure the customer receives the right outcome, the issue is resolved properly, the root cause is understood, and the organisation learns from it - so the same complaint does not happen again.
Pay: ₹1,200,000.00 - ₹1,500,000.00 per year
Experience:
- Compliant Manager: 5 years (Preferred)
Work Location: In person
