AVP – Head of Customer Complaints Resolution Unit

About This Role

The role serves as the senior interface with the Central Bank of the UAE, SANADAK, and audit functions on all matters relating to customer complaints, complaints governance, regulatory reporting, and assurance of complaint-handling practices. This includes ensuring regulatory compliance, audit readiness, and defensible complaint resolution processes.

Beyond regulatory requirements, the role leads the Resolution Hub as a customer-centric and outcome-driven function, ensuring customer issues are resolved fairly, consistently, and sustainably. The role drives deep root-cause analysis across complaints and escalations, translating recurring issues into actionable insights that inform journey redesign, process improvement, service standards, and system enhancements.

The role acts as a horizontal orchestrator across operations, frontline teams, business units, journey governance, digital, technology, and back-office functions, ensuring that service failures are not only resolved but prevented through systemic fixes.

Key Responsibilities:

Resolution Hub Leadership & Escalation Management

• Lead the Resolution Hub, comprising the Complaints & Resolution Units and the Service Excellence & Escalation Management team.
• Own end-to-end resolution of complex, high-risk, and escalated customer issues, ensuring clear accountability, timely closure, and quality outcomes.
• Establish and govern escalation frameworks across frontline, operations, digital, and business units to ensure customer issues are resolved at the right level.
• Ensure resolution outcomes balance customer fairness, operational feasibility, policy alignment, and risk considerations.

Root Cause Analysis & Systemic Improvement

• Drive structured root-cause analysis across complaints, escalations, and service failures to identify systemic issues across journeys, products, processes, policies, and systems.
• Translate complaint and service quality insights into clear problem statements and recommendations for journey governance, service design, and process re-engineering teams.
• Partner with Journey Governance, Design, Digital, and Technology teams to ensure root causes are addressed through sustainable fixes rather than tactical workarounds.
• Track and monitor closure of systemic issues to prevent repeat complaints and service failures.

Service Quality Governance

• Define and govern service quality standards across frontline and operational units, ensuring consistency in service delivery regardless of channel or product.
• Monitor service quality performance across branches, contact centre, digital servicing, and back-office operations, identifying gaps and improvement opportunities.
• Ensure alignment between service standards, customer journey design, operational processes, and frontline capabilities.
• Lead continuous improvement initiatives to raise service quality maturity across the bank.

Data, Analytics & Reporting

• Oversee complaints and service quality data frameworks, including categorisation, tagging, root-cause attribution, and trend analysis.
• Ensure complaints and escalation data is accurate, timely, and fit for regulatory reporting, management reporting, and decision-making.
• Partner with CRM, analytics, and data teams to improve visibility of customer issues across the end-to-end lifecycle.
• Provide regular insights and reporting to senior management on complaints trends, service risks, and systemic issues.

Stakeholder Management & Leadership

• Act as a trusted senior partner to business heads, operations, digital, technology, and control functions on customer resolution and service quality matters.
• Influence senior stakeholders to prioritise customer outcomes and address root causes that cut across organisational silos.
• Build a strong, customer-centric culture within the Resolution Hub, balancing empathy, discipline, and accountability.
• Develop team capability in complaints handling, investigation, root-cause analysis, and service excellence.

Complaints & Regulatory Liaison

• Serve as the bank’s senior owner for customer complaints management, including oversight of all complaints received via branches, contact centre, digital channels, SANADAK, and other regulatory or external channels.
• Act as the primary interface with the Central Bank of the UAE and SANADAK on complaints-related matters, including regulatory reporting, data submissions, responses, reviews, and inspections.
• Ensure complaints handling frameworks, policies, processes, and outcomes meet regulatory, audit, and internal governance requirements.
• Lead audit engagements and regulatory reviews relating to complaints management, service quality, and resolution practices, ensuring timely remediation of findings.
• Ensure consistent application of fair-treatment principles and defensible decision-making across all complaint resolutions.

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Banking, Operations, or a related discipline.
• Postgraduate qualification or professional certification in customer experience, operational excellence, or service quality is an advantage.
• 10–15 years’ experience in complaints management, service quality, operations, or customer experience within banking or financial services.
• Proven experience engaging with regulators and managing complaints governance, audits, and regulatory reporting.
• Strong background in operational processes, customer journeys, and service delivery models.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional resolution and drive systemic change
• Knowledge of Arabic is an Advantage