Payments Operations Coordinator

About the role

You will own the end to end management of payments related customer interactions and operational workflows from initial contact through to resolution. You will act as the primary point of contact for customers navigating payment challenges, ensuring that every engagement is handled with clarity, fairness, and consistency. This role requires you to diagnose friction in the current payments journey, map every hand off and manual step, and translate those findings into clear recommendations for improvement. You will use your energy industry knowledge to provide context specific support while maintaining strict standards for accuracy and compliance. You will leverage available tools and systems to handle volume without sacrificing the quality of the customer experience. Ultimately, you will shape the future design of the payments function by defining what a permanent version of this role should achieve.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Triage incoming payments tickets, prioritising response times and maintaining consistent standards for all incoming queries.
• Initiate outbound email and phone contact to chase unpaid invoices, clarify account details, and confirm agreed payment arrangements.
• Design and set up structured payment plans for customers experiencing financial difficulty, outlining terms and expectations clearly.
• Communicate consequences of continued non payment in a fair and transparent manner, ensuring customers understand options and obligations.
• Simultaneously navigate multiple internal systems to construct a complete view of each customer account history and current status.
• Perform manual data entry and procedural tasks that currently require human intervention, ensuring accuracy and timely completion.
• Apply AI tools and automation where appropriate to increase throughput while safeguarding accuracy and customer empathy.
• Independently analyse how the payments function operates today, documenting gaps, manual workarounds, and points of failure.
• Highlight recurring issues and bottlenecks to the permanent team as soon as they are identified, proposing practical remedies.
• Recommend alternative handling methods for recurring payment situations and execute decisions where you are the right person to act.
• Feed insights and observations back to the hiring team to directly inform decisions about the permanent role structure and responsibilities.
• Maintain detailed records of every interaction and adjustment, creating an audit trail that supports future process work.
• Collaborate closely with James Harrison Dunn, Payments Lead, to align daily actions with broader payments strategy and objectives.
• Ensure all customer communications reflect the values of transparency, fairness, and accountability in line with TEM mission.

Requirements

• You must have a background in the energy industry, which is non negotiable for this role.
• You must have prior experience in a debt, collections, sales, or complaints team, or served as an escalation point in energy customer service.
• You must be hands on with customer facing tools such as Zendesk, Intercom, or Kolleno in previous roles.
• You must be comfortable managing multiple systems and teams at the same time to achieve the best outcome for customers.
• You must demonstrate resilience when handling a high volume of difficult conversations without compromising service quality.
• You must genuinely care about supporting customers in payment difficulty, balancing their needs with the commercial objectives of the business.
• You must be a self starter who takes ownership of ambiguous situations and drives them to resolution.
• You must be legally permitted to work in the United Kingdom without sponsorship, as no sponsorship is offered for this role.

Nice to have

• Experience working with payments or billing platforms commonly used in the energy sector.
• Familiarity with reconciliation processes and variance analysis for transaction level issues.
• Exposure to AI assisted workflows or tools in a customer service or operations context.
• Understanding of regulatory considerations around debt communication and energy billing.

Practical notes

This is a 6 month fixed term contract role with no indication of extension at present. The position is based in the United Kingdom and requires full time availability during standard working hours. Candidates must be able to start within the next two weeks and commit to the full duration of the engagement. Travel is not expected as the role is fully remote, though occasional online meetings with the team may be required at mutually agreed times. Applicants must hold a valid right to work in the United Kingdom, and no visa sponsorship will be provided for this role.