Sr Client Advocate

Overview

Job Title: Sr Client Advocate I

Responsible for establishing, building and maintaining sustainable client relationships. Ensures appropriate client communication, client focus and client control of priorities by coordinating with client organization at strategic, tactical and operational levels. Works with customer to identify opportunities for innovation, cost reduction, improved efficiencies and business challenges. Acts as liaison between I/S and leadership for assigned business units. Ensures that design and integration of proposed system, software and hardware solutions leads to development and growth of the business through effective use of technology.

May participate in training and development of staff. May assist department managers in day-to-day operations of department.

• 25% Account Management:
  Acts as account manager responsible for collection, analysis, review, documentation and communication of customer needs and requirements. Ensures I/S solutions are tailored to customer’s strategies by continually obtaining a complete understanding of customer’s business needs from initial requirements to final implementation. Communicates quickly and accurately. Manages political and interpersonal issues. Fosters relationships between customer and I/S organization and analyzes problems, settles disputes and negotiates with customer within current contractual boundaries.
  
  Acts as specialist in client’s business and generalist in I/S products/services.
• 25% Steering Support:
  Helps customer define business needs as specific changes and works with customer on priority setting. Allows customer to have major influence over I/S work priorities, therefore improving customer control over costs of products and services I/S delivers. Assists in definition of I/S work/audit requests and completes packaging/delivery of I/S work/audit requests estimates and supporting documentation to customer. Negotiates final estimates, authorization, and start/completion dates for each request with customer.
  
  Provides tracking of work requests to allow better control of costs. Monitors work requests to ensure delivery of products/services based on customer’s priorities, estimates and dates. Updates I/S Product Catalog with product features.
• 20% Systems/Services Monitoring:
  Monitors service levels, reports actual versus agreed to service levels and reviews service levels with customer to determine opportunities for improvement. Establishes and reports metrics that measure I/S performance and satisfaction to customer. Reports Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance. Analyzes requested and existing SLAs for reasonableness and takes appropriate action. Reports overall customer status to I/S Management. Provides strategic consultancy support to assigned customers in defining of designing business or technological processes.
  
  Responsible for quality oversight of project work being done to ensure on-time delivery, within budget, with high quality and to customer specifications.
• 15% Internal Marketing:
  Takes proactive marketing approach when communicating with customer in response to external requests for change or internal I/S product activity. Focuses on customer needs and makes customer aware of potential offerings that could meet those needs and/or add value. Designs products/services with common components that can be leveraged across many customers. Establishes pricing, obtains approval by LOB management and packages/delivers to customer.
  
  Focuses communication with customer on features offered in I/S Product Catalog and works with I/S team to propose and build tailored, customer-focused solutions.
• 15% Product Improvement:
  Researches/discovers opportunities to employ proper subsets of I/S and its products/services. Identifies customer’s strategic business strategies, finds the right products/services to fill customer’s need and uses internal Marketing to sell solution. Researches/tracks industry trends and maintains knowledge of new technologies in area of expertise to better evaluate business unit service requests, requirements and proposals. Summarizes customer’s business strategies and communicates…