Director, Tax Experience & Operations

📋 Description

• • As the Director, Client Experience & Business Operations (Tax) at Mercer Advisors, you will be the pivotal leader responsible for orchestrating end-to-end operational excellence and ensuring a seamless, high-quality experience for both clients and advisors within our Tax Services division. This role is critical to enhancing client satisfaction, fostering client retention, and unlocking significant productivity gains for our tax teams. You will be at the forefront of modernizing our tax delivery engine, driving innovation, and optimizing our operational capabilities to meet the evolving needs of the families we serve.
• • Your primary focus will be on defining and executing a superior, multi-channel Tax client experience and advisor experience. This encompasses every touchpoint, from initial onboarding and ongoing service delivery to proactive communication and critical "moments that matter." You will develop tailored strategies for tax-only clients and those with more complex financial needs, ensuring consistency and excellence across the board. A key aspect of this will be establishing and operationalizing robust Voice of the Customer (VOC) and Voice of the Firm (VOF) listening posts, systematically gathering insights, and translating them into prioritized improvements that yield measurable positive outcomes.
• • You will also be instrumental in driving operating leverage, enhancing capacity, and boosting efficiency and quality across all tax workflows. This involves leading comprehensive process redesign initiatives, from initial quoting and routing to intake, preparation, review, and final delivery. The goal is to streamline operations, reduce friction, and elevate the overall throughput and quality of our tax services. You will build and implement a sophisticated operating system for Tax, incorporating essential elements such as capacity planning, strategic work segmentation, effective load balancing, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and clearly defined ownership structures.
• • A significant part of your role will be to reduce the administrative burden on our Tax managers and teams. By simplifying workflows, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and implementing scalable support mechanisms, you will empower our tax professionals to focus more on high-value client work and strategic initiatives. This operational refinement is key to fostering a more productive and engaging work environment.
• • You will establish and maintain critical operational telemetry, including comprehensive dashboards, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and regular operating rhythms. This will provide essential transparency into key metrics such as volume, cycle times, work-in-progress (WIP), quality scores, and operational bottlenecks. This data-driven approach will enable informed decision-making and proactive problem-solving.
• • Furthermore, you will define, meticulously track, and report on key outcomes, including client and advisor experience, team productivity, and technology adoption rates. Leading monthly and quarterly performance reviews, complete with actionable plans, will be a core responsibility, ensuring continuous improvement and accountability across the tax operations.
• • This role demands strong cross-functional collaboration and partnership. You will work closely with Technology/Product teams and Tax leadership on critical tax technology stack initiatives. This includes the development and implementation of new tooling for onboarding, document sharing, workflow automation, and enhancements to existing systems like Aspen. A crucial element of this partnership is ensuring "operational readiness" for all technology deployments, guaranteeing smooth integration and adoption.
• • You will act as a translator, converting identified operational pain points into clear, actionable business requirements for technology and process improvements. Driving effective change management, providing robust training enablement, and ensuring widespread adoption across all relevant stakeholders will be paramount to the success of these initiatives.
• • As a senior leader, you will demonstrate exceptional comfort and competence in navigating and leading through significant change. You will serve as a unifying force, aligning diverse teams across Tax, Wealth Management, Client Service, and Operations around shared priorities, strategic sequencing, and accountable execution. Building and nurturing strong relationships with Tax leaders, advisors, and client service teams is essential. You will also act as a key escalation point for systemic issues, proactively identifying and removing blockers to ensure smooth operations and continuous progress.
• • Success in this role will be measured by tangible improvements in the tax client experience, evidenced by increased client and advisor satisfaction scores, alongside significant gains in productivity metrics, such as returns processed per Full-Time Employee (FTE). Specific success indicators include reduced onboarding cycle times, fewer handoff failures and instances of rework, increased tax team capacity and productivity through effective workflow segmentation and reduced administrative overhead, enhanced transparency via robust operational telemetry and established operating rhythms, and measurable adoption of process and technology enhancements across all tax stakeholders.
• • This is an exciting opportunity to shape the future of tax operations at a leading RIA firm, making a direct impact on the financial lives of thousands of families and the professionals who serve them. Your leadership will be key to driving efficiency, enhancing experience, and solidifying Mercer Advisors' position as a premier provider of integrated financial services.