Reports to: Head of Partnerships
Direct reports: None
Salary: £25,000-£27,000
Start date: As soon as possible
Contract: Permanent contract, 37.5 hours per week
Location: 2 days per week in London (Shepherds Bush), other days can be worked from home or in the office

Purpose of role

The Partnerships Executive will be responsible for ensuring that Ark Curriculum Plus customers receive outstanding support to promote customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. You will oversee support with pre- and post-sales administration, the customer service process, and enable the wider Partnerships team to qualify new opportunities for growth.

Who we are

Ark Curriculum Plus is a not-for-profit education venture. Our mission is to empower teachers to give every young person, regardless of their background, the subject knowledge and skills that will allow them to succeed. We believe that great curriculum design and delivery leads to improved teaching and learner outcomes, which impacts positively on children’s life chances.

Our commitment is to empower and equip schools to provide high quality subject teaching, through curriculum and integrated professional development, in order to develop young people’s subject mastery.

We are grown out of one of the highest performing Multi Academy Trust’s in the UK. Our connection with Ark gives us our experience and our specialist expertise earned while we developed and taught curriculum across our own network of 37 successful academies in the UK.

Our programmes, including Mathematics Mastery and English Mastery, are now used by over 500 schools in the UK, including the 37 schools in the Ark network, and last year, 93% of the schools that joined us continued with the programme. Having pioneered the mastery approach and been recognised by Ofsted, we also influenced the adoption by the Department for Education of a mastery approach to teaching mathematics. It has been proven through independent impact trials that learners on our programmes make additional months’ progress.

Scope of job

Reporting to the Head of Partnerships, primarily the role will involve interacting with customers through a variety of channels to ensure they are completely satisfied with the service they receive, resolving customer queries in a timely and efficient manner. However, this isn’t a standard customer service role, you’ll be responsible for pro-actively supporting customers to ensure they are getting value and satisfaction from our programmes as well as managing initial interest from prospective partner schools. You will also be supporting general business administration.

This role is vital to support the success of our programmes and to contribute to our thriving sales team to meet the needs of our new and existing partner schools

Key Responsibilities

Pre-sales support

• Day to day management of our free trial experience, liaising with prospective new partner schools, monitoring usage to encourage greater sales conversion.
• Track and manage the progression of inbound sales leads through the sales pipeline.
• Raise awareness of our product range and generate leads for the sales team through targeted outbound prospecting campaigns.
• Tracking marketing campaign engagement to progress warmer leads into opportunities for the wider Partnerships team.
• Support set-up and host webinar information sessions (via Zoom) to expand the reach of our programmes.
• Provide administrative support to the Partnerships teams for their attendance at sales events including packing and couriering promotional materials.
• Segment data to create targeted contact lists for outbound sales campaigns.
• Supporting calls and communications to our existing partnership to help secure programme renewals.

Post-sales support

• Assist the Partnerships team to onboard large and complex sales, supporting with large data updates and sales administration via CRM (Salesforce).
• Create programme usage and value for money analysis reports for some of our largest Multi Academy Trust partners.
• Overseeing the onboarding process, to ensure all Ark Curriculum Plus customers receive a smooth and seamless experience when joining and/or renewing their subscription.
• To carry out welcome calls to new customers, to ensure they feel well equipped to get started in delivering the programme(s) within their schools.
• Issuing all customer invoices and credit notes, contacting school finance teams on occasions when payments become overdue.

Customer Service

• Proudly represent Ark Curriculum Plus as the first point of contact for programme queries, offering outstanding service to deliver complete customer satisfaction.
• Monitor customer support email inboxes and answering phone calls; prioritising queries to ensure they are handled quickly and efficiently within service level agreements.
• Be inquisitive, working closely with customers to ensure they are satisfied with the services they receive and to improve upon areas of dissatisfaction.
• Maintain thorough and accurate customer service records.
• Troubleshoot and resolve customer complaints quickly and patiently.
• Be knowledgeable about our programmes and developments, taking responsibility to resolve queries directly, limiting the need for escalation.
• Own and maintain Ark Curriculum Plus’ frequently asked question database, ensuring it is kept live and up to date at all times.
• Work as part of the sales team to recognise potential growth opportunities and support early stage buying enquiries by escalating to the sales teams as appropriate.
• Assist finance department with accounting and invoicing enquiries.
• Provide first line support for users of our digital learning platform, MyMastery, often including password re-sets.
• Provide regular customer service-based updates to the business including analysis of reoccurring themes and key insights.

General business administration

• Liaise with third party suppliers to arrange purchase orders and invoices as well as supporting arranging collections and deliveries via couriers as needed.
• Ensure that data is processed accurately and kept up to date in line with Data Protection legislation.
• Collating monthly invoices and credit card spend for submission to the Ark finance team.
• Supporting exco with setting up key staff meetings & away days.
• Collecting, distributing, and mailing post and packages as and when necessary.
• Updating staff on email distributions, Teams groups, SharePoint, and the Ark Curriculum Plus organisation chart.
• To identify and carry out any other duties which fall within the scope, spirit and purpose of the post as requested.

Person Specification

Attributes

• A people person, who goes the extra mile to provide excellent service and customer experience.
• Ability to juggle competing demands and priorities within deadlines.
• Attentive to detail, accurate record keeper.
• Demonstrates resilience and can work well under pressure.
• Natural problem solver.
• Great listening skills.
• Critical thinker who is naturally inquisitive.
• A strong team player, able to successfully develop relationships with colleagues across business functions, potentially whilst working remotely.
• Demonstrates the values which are aligned to those of Ark Curriculum Plus.

Experience and skills

• Experience in a customer success or customer service-based role.
• Strong administrative and organisation skills with excellent attention to detail.
• Experience with CRM (Salesforce desirable).
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Confident in using IT systems; Microsoft office and other digital tools to complete tasks and resolve queries.
• Experience within education sector (desirable).
• Experience in or an interest in developing within a sales support or sales role in future.

Qualifications
• Right to work in the UK

To apply for this role email your CV and cover letter to jade.sewell@arkcurriculumplus.org.uk