Team Leader - Collections & Customer Contact

About us

City Finance is an Australian lender based in Brisbane. We're growing quickly.

A core value is Better every day. For this role that means constantly running experiments and looking for ways to improve how the team and the company work.

The role:

You'll run our Manila collections and customer contact team. That means coaching the agents, watching the numbers, checking the work, and helping us work out which conversations should be automated and which need an actual person.

The team is nine people — young, energetic and quick with digital channels. They'll go a lot further with someone who coaches them properly.

You'll report to our Head of Operations in Brisbane. You're the senior person in the room in Manila, so day-to-day calls are yours to make — we're not expecting things to be sent to Australia by default. What we do expect is that you flag the things that matter, in writing, early.

What you'll do

• Run the team. Nine agents — rostering, workloads, who owns which customers, and the priorities each day.
  


• Coach. One-to-ones and reviewing calls and messages together. Two-way SMS is our main proactive channel, so a lot of this is written tone and negotiation.
  


• Check the work. Spot check files: arrangements set up properly and genuinely affordable, notes accurate, hardship and vulnerability handled right. You decide what to sample and how often.
  


• Watch the numbers. Contact rates, promise-to-pay conversion and kept rates, arrears movement — by agent and by customer group.
  


• Keep us compliant. Australian credit rules apply to every conversation — hardship obligations, what can be said about credit file consequences, vulnerable customers. We'll train you, then it's on you to hold the team to it.
  


• Balance automation, AI and people. We lean heavily on automated and templated contact. You'll work out what should be automated, what an agent should handle and what needs a phone call, notice when the automation stops working, and push for people where people are needed.
  


• Test and improve. Run experiments on comms, process and tooling, and bring us one worked-through recommendation a month — the reasoning too, not just the idea.
  

What you'll need:

Essential

• 10+ years in a contact centre or customer contact role.
  


• 5+ years leading a team of eight or more, accountable for how they performed.
  


• Solid collections experience — arrears, payment arrangements, hardship conversations, and knowing when to push and when to back off.
  


• A track record of developing staff.
  


• Real QA experience: deciding what to sample, reviewing calls and files against a standard, and using what you find to coach.
  


• Comfortable with data. You can read a performance report, form a view and defend it.
  


• Willing to recommend changes to people more senior than you.
  


• Experience running a team when your manager sits in another country. You'll need to work without being chased, know what to escalate, and write a clear account of what's happening.
  


• Excellent written and spoken English.
  

Nice to have

• Experience with an Australian, UK or US consumer lender.
  


• Experience working with automated contact strategies, diallers or AI tools.
  


• Salesforce or a similar CRM.
  


• Experience rebuilding a process, not just running one.