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Case Study – Insurance Operations Director
Douglas Jackson partnered with privately owned, scaling insurance business with both B2B and B2C operations, to appoint an Operations Director responsible for leading a large scale customer operation across multiple brands, combining operational performance, digital transformation, customer experience and commercial growth.
The role sat within a fast growth, regulated insurance environment and carried responsibility for around 400 FTE across in house and outsourced operations. The successful leader needed to drive operational turnaround, support a digital first transformation programme, improve recruitment and coaching capability, strengthen outsourced partner performance and help develop the wider customer experience, loyalty and retention strategy.
The Challenge
This was not a conventional contact-centre leadership brief.
This complex, regulated, entrepruenurial Insurance business needed someone who could combine strategic operational leadership with customer, commercial and transformation capability.
The role was expected to improve service quality, support growth and profitability, lead multi channel customer operations, improve retention and lifetime value and ensure the operating model across people, process and technology could scale effectively.
The successful candidate also needed to lead change across a complex stakeholder environment, influence at senior level and balance customer outcomes with commercial performance.
The brief required someone with:
- Significant leadership experience in complex, regulated customer operations
- Experience leading successful change and transformation
- A strong commercial mindset
- Digital customer service experience
- The ability to inspire and influence across the organisation
- Strong supplier and outsourced-partner leadership
- The judgement to balance customer and commercial priorities
Those capabilities were explicitly built into the role framework.
Our Approach
Douglas Jackson built the search around both capability and leadership fit.
Rather than matching candidates purely against functional experience, the process focused on the broader requirements of the role: commercial judgement, transformation delivery, customer leadership, cultural fit and the ability to operate credibly at senior level.
The briefing process gave candidates a detailed view of the organisation, the role mission, operating environment, transformation priorities, performance measures and leadership expectations.
That level of clarity became an important part of candidate engagement.
The successful candidate later highlighted the role briefing materials as a clear differentiator, particularly the detail, alignment to his experience and the transparency around what both sides were looking for.
The Outcome
The quality of the shortlist stood out immediately.
The COO and CMO told Douglas Jackson:
“Your candidates compared to our own internally sourced and recommended contacts were head and shoulders above the bar.”
They added that they had reached the end of the process with two individuals they believed would be great assets to the team, and that they had been “super impressed by the process and outcome”.
That is an important result because the benchmark was not an empty market. The client had already sourced and received recommendations through its own network. Douglas Jackson still produced candidates the leadership team regarded as significantly stronger.
The successful candidate accepted the Operations Director position and brought senior leadership experience gained across a wide variety of organisations in Utilities, Telco and regulated services.
Candidate Experience
The candidate’s feedback reinforces another part of the search that is easy to overlook: senior candidates judge the quality of a search firm by how well the process is run. They described the briefing packs as:
“Really impressive… the clarity, the detail and the attention to detail… sets apart a lot of recruitment organisations that I’ve worked with over the years.”
They also highlighted the quality of the conversations around their own plans and aspirations, and the honesty, transparency and regular feedback throughout the process.
What mattered to them was that Douglas Jackson balanced the needs of the client with their own career ambitions rather than treating candidate and employer requirements as separate agendas.
They summarised the outcome particularly well:
“It was about really finding a role for me that suits exactly what I want in my career, where I’m going and what my skill set looks like.”
And when asked whether he would recommend Douglas Jackson:
“From a C-level perspective, I would wholeheartedly recommend Douglas Jackson.”
What This Demonstrates
- Operations Director recruitment
- Insurance leadership
- Customer operations
- Digital transformation
- Outsourced operations
- Executive assessment
- Senior candidate engagement
- Market mapping beyond internal networks
- Commercial and customer leadership
- Candidate experience
- Leadership fit
- Executive search quality
The strongest senior search processes do more than generate candidates. They create clarity around the brief, test leadership fit properly and engage people who may not otherwise have considered the opportunity.
Hiring an Operations Director or senior customer operations leader?
Douglas Jackson works with Insurance, Financial Services and other regulated organisations to appoint senior leaders across Operations, Customer, Transformation, Strategy and wider Executive leadership.
We help clients identify leaders who can deliver operational performance today while building the capability needed for future growth and transformation.
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