We are seeking a forward-looking Global Business Services leader with 8-10+ years of progressive experience in GBS, Shared Services, Operations, Business Transformation, or Process Excellence. The successful candidate will combine strong operational leadership with the ability to build organizational capabilities, develop talent, drive digital transformation, and create measurable business value. Experience leading cross-functional teams, implementing process improvements, accelerating automation and AI adoption, and partnering with senior business stakeholders is essential.
The Operations Manager is responsible for end-to-end service delivery across assigned KONE Business Services operations and supports the growth of the KONE Customer Care Centre in Kuala Lumpur, including site leadership responsibilities. This customer-centric role is accountable for service performance, stakeholder and customer experience, people leadership and continuous improvement. Leading Team Leaders, specialists, analysts, and operational teams, the incumbent will ensure stable, efficient, compliant, and high-quality service delivery while fostering a high-performance culture, minimizing escalations, and advancing standardized, data-driven ways of working.
Key Responsibilities
Operational and Customer Service Leadership
- Own end-to-end operational delivery, including KL Site deliverables, service levels, quality, productivity, capacity, compliance, and customer experience.
- Lead the expansion and operational readiness of the KONE Customer Care Centre
- Establish a strong customer service culture focused on responsiveness, empathy, effective resolution, and professional communication.
- Maintain visibility of volumes, backlogs, ageing, customer contacts, service risks, capacity, and business-critical exceptions.
- Ensure effective workforce planning, workload balancing, cross-training, backup coverage, and business continuity.
- Lead the transition and stabilization of new countries, services, and customer-care activities into KL KBS.
Performance, Ownership and Escalation Management
- Deliver agreed SLAs, turnaround times, quality, productivity, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes.
- Build a zero-surprise culture by identifying and communicating risks before they impact customers or stakeholders.
- Own critical issues through containment, root-cause analysis, corrective action, and sustainable closure.
- Ensure performance gaps have clear recovery actions, owners, deadlines, and measurable outcomes.
- Use operational and customer data to identify trends, recurring issues, and improvement opportunities.
- Act as the senior escalation point for significant operational, customer, people, and stakeholder matters.
People and High-Performance Culture
- Lead, coach, and develop Team Leaders and operational teams.
- Set clear expectations and hold leaders accountable for results, employee development, communication, and customer experience.
- Strengthen work discipline, ownership, accountability, and proactive communication.
- Provide timely feedback, recognize strong performance, and address underperformance promptly and fairly.
- Build future-ready capabilities in customer service, problem-solving, data, AI, automation, and stakeholder management.
- Reduce key-person dependency through cross-training, succession planning, and structured knowledge management.
- Hire and develop talent aligned with a high-performance and customer-centric culture.
Customer and Stakeholder Partnership
- Build trusted relationships with KONE units, business leaders, process owners, and global stakeholders.
- Represent KL KBS as an accountable customer-service and transformation partner.
- Establish disciplined governance focused on performance, customer feedback, risks, decisions, and action closure.
- Communicate proactively when service, quality, or customer commitments are at risk.
- Convert customer and stakeholder feedback into measurable service improvements.
- Collaborate across KBS locations and functions to resolve end-to-end issues and scale successful practices.
AI, Automation and Process Transformation
- Create and deliver an AI and automation roadmap linked to customer experience and operational outcomes. Process improvement, harmonization, automation identification, and capability building in tools such as Copilot, Power BI, and Power Automate.
- Identify opportunities to simplify, standardize, automate, and improve customer and operational processes.
- Develop AI champions and citizen developers within the operations teams.
- Partner with Automation & AI, Business Intelligence, IT, and process owners to implement and scale solutions.
- Track adoption and realized benefits across service quality, response time, productivity, capacity, and customer experience.
- Ensure accountable human review of AI-supported decisions and outputs.
Key Performance Measures
- Customer satisfaction and customer-care experience
- SLA achievement, responsiveness, and turnaround time
- Quality, right-first-time resolution, and repeat contacts
- Backlog, ageing, productivity, and capacity utilization
- Avoidable and repeat escalations
- Root-cause and corrective-action closure
- Stakeholder satisfaction and governance action closure
- Employee engagement, attrition, capability, and succession
- AI and automation adoption with measurable benefits
- Transition, expansion, and stabilization of new services
Qualifications and Experience (Essential)
- University degree in related field (Good in Finance), or comparable professional experience.
- 8 to 12 Years of experience in Operations Management, Site leading, Customer Service, Customer Care, Contact Centre, Service Operations,
- Demonstrated experience leading Team Leaders and sizeable operational teams.
- Strong people leadership, coaching, stakeholder management, and change-leadership capability.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
- Excellent written and spoken English.
- Ability to work effectively across countries, cultures, and organizational levels.
- Practical experience with AI, Copilot, Power Automate, Power BI, workflow automation, or comparable digital tools.
- Experience working across multiple countries, services, or legal entities.
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At KONE, we are focused on creating an innovative and collaborative working culture where we value the contribution of each individual. Employee engagement is a key focus area for us and we encourage participation and the sharing of information and ideas. Sustainability is an integral part of our culture and the daily practice. We follow ethical business practices and we seek to develop a culture of working together where co-workers trust and respect each other and good performance is recognized. In being a great place to work, we are proud to offer a range of experiences and opportunities that will help you to achieve your career and personal goals and enable you to live a healthy and balanced life.
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