Service Desk Manager

Job title: Service Desk Manager

Department: IT

Location: Peterborough or Halifax

Hours: 37.5 hours per week

Salary: Competitive plus bonus

Were looking for a Service Desk Manager to be part of our success story.

**Listed in the 2022 Sunday Times 100: Britains fastest-growing private companies.
**Great career development opportunities grow with us.

About the role

Overall responsibility for managing the IT Service Desk and support operations across Activate Group ensuring consistent high-quality service delivery to both internal and external customers. This includes overseeing service requests incidents major incidents and problem management while driving efficiency and continuous improvement across IT operations. The role will lead a team of 1st to 3rd line support analysts based in Peterborough and Halifax ensuring effective prioritisation timely resolution and excellent customer addition to team leadership the Service Desk Manager will own ITSM processes monitor service performance and act as the escalation point for major issues ensuring service reliability and alignment with business needs.

Key responsibilities

• Lead coach and develop a team of Support Analysts across 1st 2nd and 3rd line support functions.

• Manage the day-to-day operation of the IT Service Desk ensuring service requests and incidents are logged prioritised and resolved within agreed SLAs.

• Act as the senior escalation point for major incidents coordinating technical resources and business communications.

• Drive proactive problem management to reduce recurring issues and improve overall service reliability.

• Own and continuously improve ITSM processes including incident request problem change and major incident management.

• Monitor report and improve service desk KPIs such as response times resolution rates backlog management and satisfaction.

• Ensure high-quality communication with internal and external customers keeping users informed throughout the incident/request lifecycle.

• Collaborate with infrastructure platform and development teams to ensure effective handoffs and resolution of complex issues.

• Foster a culture of customer service excellence accountability and continuous improvement within the support team.

• Ensure compliance with IT governance audit and security standards.

• Contribute to wider IT strategy by identifying opportunities to improve efficiency automation and the overall end-user experience.

Skills and experience

• Proven experience managing an IT Service Desk or technical support function ideally across multiple sites.

• Strong knowledge of ITSM frameworks (ITIL v4 Foundation or higher preferred).

• Hands-on experience with incident problem request and major incident management.

• Demonstrated ability to lead coach and develop technical support teams across 1st3rd line.

• Experience handling major incidents and crisis communications with senior stakeholders.

• Strong customer service orientation with excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

• Familiarity with ITSM tooling (e.g. HaloITSMServiceNow or similar).

• Good understanding of infrastructure networking and end-user technologies sufficient to manage escalations.

• Ability to balance operational demands with process improvement and long-term service maturity.

• Ability to balance strategic leadership with occasional hands-on technical input.

Benefits

• 33 days holiday (including bank holidays)
• Personal health cash plan claim back the cost of things like dentist and optical check ups
• Enhanced maternity / paternity / adoption / shared parental pay
• Life assurance: three times basic salary
• Free breakfasts and fruit
• Birthday surprise for everybody!

What you can expect from us

At Activate Group looking after team members is a major priority. Whether youre at our smart Halifax or Peterborough offices one of our AAR sites or working from home well make sure you have all the support you need to succeed.

From benefits that put your health and wellbeing first to impressive rewards for our employee of the month and little perks like free fruit and cereal well go out of our way to show how much we appreciate you.

A bit about us

Named by the Sunday Times as one of the UKs 100 fastest-growing private companies we employ more than 700 team members nationwide.

We work with some of the UKs largest fleets and insurance companies supporting drivers that have been involved in a road incident at our contact centres in Halifax and Peterborough.

We look after every step of the repair process repairing vehicles at our own Activate Accident Repair body shops and through a UK-wide network of independent repair partners.

Want to know what its like to work with us Take a look at our purpose and values. They define who we are and how we work with team members customers and suppliers:

Purpose: Make someones bad day better

Values:

• Make it happen Be accountable. Take the initiative work fast and do a great job.
• Strive for better Be bold. Challenge the norm make small improvements often.
• Win together Be a team-player. Win together learn together respect each other.