Head of Customer Support and Incident Response

Job description
This role is central to how HMRC supports customers affected by security issues and leads the response to incidents, within the identity-focused FPC in HMRC Security. You will lead the Customer Support Team and the Incident Response Team, ensuring customers receive timely, high‑quality support, whether they need help with everyday security concerns or we need to mobilise a coordinated response to larger, more complex incidents.

Key accountabilities include:

Lead and develop high-performing teams delivering customer support and incident response services, setting clear objectives, performance measures and service standards to deliver strong outcomes for customers and HMRC.

Oversee end-to-end customer support and fraud response operations, including victim intake, technical analysis, containment, advocacy, case management, complaints and remediation, ensuring services are timely, consistent and effective.

Own incident preparedness and response, ensuring effective planning, playbooks, established relationships, triage, command, coordination and escalation proportionate to the severity and risk of incidents.

Ensure incidents are managed and reported effectively, working closely with Communications and Customer Services Group, with robust post-incident reviews and clear lessons learned that inform improvements to processes, capabilities and controls working with FPC Engineering teams.

Build strong relationships across FPC, HMRC and external partners to enable joined-up delivery, effective remediation, and clear communication during routine operations and significant incidents.

Establish and mature the frameworks that provide you with the data and insight to monitor end-to-end service performance, identify bottlenecks, improve customer journeys, and evidence where changes to process, capacity or capability are needed.
Person specification
You will be an experienced senior operational leader, able to build and lead high-performing teams in a fast-paced, evolving and highly scrutinised environment. You will bring credibility in customer support, incident response, fraud operations or a closely related field, with the judgement to lead through both routine operational demand and more complex or high-profile incidents. You will be comfortable setting direction across multiple service areas, establishing clear objectives and standards, developing relationships across business lines and negotiating service level agreements to ensure your teams can deliver consistent, high-quality outcomes for customers. You will combine strong people leadership with a customer-centred mindset, creating an environment of accountability, professionalism and continuous improvement, while supporting victims of identity-related fraud and ensuring they receive clear, timely and effective help.

You will be confident operating across organisational boundaries, working closely with senior leaders, operational teams and specialist partners across HMRC to coordinate incident response, customer remediation and service improvement. You will be skilled at using insight, performance data and operational evidence to identify bottlenecks, prioritise resources and improve how services are delivered. You will have strong communication and influencing skills, be comfortable making decisions in time-critical and high-pressure situations, and be able to balance customer needs, operational risk and organisational priorities. Above all, you will be motivated by strengthening HMRC’s ability to respond to identity-related security issues, improve the customer experience, and turn lessons from operational work into lasting improvements to services, processes and controls across the Fraud Prevention Centre and HMRC.

Essential Criteria

Proven experience leading high-performing operational teams in customer support, incident response, fraud operations or a closely related environment, with accountability for delivery, performance and continuous improvement.

Strong people leadership skills, with experience of building inclusive, multi-disciplinary teams, setting clear objectives, managing performance, and developing capability at scale.

Demonstrable experience of leading structured incident management, including planning, triage, command, coordination, communications, playbooks and post-incident review.

Strong understanding of identity fraud threats and how they affect customers and services across digital and telephony channels, with the ability to lead responses that balance customer support, fraud prevention and operational risk.

Experience of working with fraud prevention, detection or response controls in customer-facing services, including technologies such as voice biometrics, authentication controls, telephony platforms, case management tools or related operational controls.

Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills, with the ability to coordinate joined-up responses across operational, technical, policy, legal, risk, communications and customer service teams.

Ability to set and manage service levels, quality standards and performance measures, using data and operational insight to improve customer journeys, identify bottlenecks and drive continuous improvement.

Sound judgement, resilience and strong communication skills, with the ability to make decisions in high-pressure situations, manage escalations, and provide clear updates and briefings to senior stakeholders.

More info can be found in the full job description on CS Jobs.