Black Star Energy is looking for a driven, analytical professional who has a demonstrated track record problem solving and team leadership for a new position, Manager of Customer Operations for the Ashanti Region, based in Black Star Energy’s Kumasi office.   The candidate will lead project operations in the Ashanti region with overall responsibility for serving our customers in our communities, improving operational performance and quality of service, and growing revenue and operational profitability in the region. Black Star Energy is a fast-growing company backed by investors from the United States and offers a mission driven, usually fun, and always rigorous work environment with significant opportunities for training and development as well as professional growth.

If you are a qualified applicant, please send your CV and cover letter to [email protected] before 31 January 2017.

Job Duties:

Lead team of customer service representatives (Community Managers) to achieve our customer service goals including:

• High quality customer service which is easy for our customers to access and get their issues resolved
• Efficient collection of revenue and reduction of customer delinquencies
• Support of local distributors
• Working in communities to expand the number of customers that benefit from our offerings
• Educate customers on energy efficiency and other opportunities to add value to our customers
• Develop tools to market services and educate customers on how to benefit from them
• Ensure customer records are accurate and complete
• Use BSE proprietary platform to support customer service activities and ensure that data in the system is accurate and complete.

Manage team of maintenance technicians to ensure 99.5%+ uptime for our systems

• Schedule and ensure completion of preventative maintenance
• Prioritize and ensure delivery of customer maintenance requests
• Coordinate with engineering team for resolution of recurring issues
• Track and improve maintenance team cost effectiveness, quality and speed of issue resolution
• Ensure training and professional development of maintenance team to deliver increasingly high quality of service

Manage local delivery of services.  Some BSE services require a local person to provide service to their communities.  The manager of project operations oversees their activities, ensures high quality service for our customers. Identifies any issues with service delivery and proposes solution at a local or systemic level.

Reporting and analysis:

• Develop and use numerical reports and score cards to analyze and communicate relative performance of projects. Identify issues and develop recommendations for improving performance, when appropriate developing full business case for implementing recommendations
• Define business requirements for improving software platform
• Provide consistent, timely and accurate reporting to management on project performance

 

Candidate Experience

• Minimum requirement undergraduate degree from leading university with 5 – 10 years work experience. Preferred degrees include engineering and business management degrees.
• Experience must include managing teams of at least 5 people in a business or technical environment and delivering and sustaining high performing results.
• Candidates must also have high levels of proficiency in Microsoft office products including being able to run your own analysis in excel and present the findings in power point that meets professional standards.
• Candidates must have demonstrated experience working in a collaborative and demanding environment.
• Desired experience also includes having worked in rural communities in Ghana and/ or in a technical organization (software, civil engineering, electrical engineering). Similarly, experience in similar roles managing field teams of customer support or field sales people would be desirable.
• Fluency in English and Asante Twi required. Proficiency in at least one other Ghanaian language desired.

About Black Star Energy

Black Star Energy provides solar powered electricity to off grid communities in Ghana that is affordable, reliable and scalable so that families and households can thrive. We are currently providing electricity to 1500 people in the Ashanti region of Ghana and have plans to expand rapidly through 2017 and beyond, with top quality engineering, maintenance and customer support teams.   Black Star Energy is a subsidiary of Energicity Corp a US corporation founded by two business and solar engineering leaders from the United States, Joe Philip and Nicole Poindexter.

The core values of Black Star Energy are:

Excellence – Everything we do must be of the highest quality from building and maintaining solar systems, to our software systems, to our documentation.  We double and triple check our own work and each other’s work.  We take responsibility for making things great; we also take responsibility and fix things immediately with anyone who is impacted if anything is less than great.

Learning – we strive to always be learning as an organization and as individuals.  We are solution oriented in all things.   If there’s a problem, we’re always looking at ways to fix it.  If there’s not a problem, we’re always looking for ways to innovate to be the best we can be.  We set up experiments and tests to try to do things better, we learn when things work, we learn when things don’t.  We aren’t afraid to fail, we ARE afraid not to learn.

Teamwork – we value our team and we value each other.  We have each other’s back.  We communicate when something is working well and on track, we over communicate when something is not working well or on track.  We trust each other and trust that we are all working for the good of the company – and if something isn’t working the way we think it should, the course of action is to communicate, to be solution oriented, and to have each other’s back.

Honor – just as we honor each other, we honor the communities in which we work.  We respect our clients, we respect our stake holders.   We recognize that we are working across multiple cultures and that we try to understand each other’s perspective – knowing that it is our differences that make us the best. We may not always agree with each other, our customers, our stake holders, but at the core of every interaction must be respect.  There is no excuse for ever violating this.