Head of Customer Experience & Service Design

Role Overview

Head of Customer Experience & Service Design at Al Tayer Insignia, Dubai, UAE. This role owns end-to-end experience design strategy and execution across physical, digital, and phygital touchpoints for the portfolio.

Company Overview

Al Tayer Insignia is part of Al Tayer Group, a luxury retail partner to the world's most iconic brands operating for over 40 years. The company operates boutiques, department stores, and leading online platforms across the GCC with a seamless omnichannel presence. The team is customer-obsessed, diverse, and passionate about creativity and innovation.

Role Purpose

Own the development and execution of a differentiated, customer-centric experience design strategy that shapes the value proposition of Al Tayer Insignia's brands and concepts beyond products. Translate customer intelligence, trends, and insights into strategic design interventions across all touchpoints, reinvent retail formats, build and scale a formal experience design discipline, and enable the delivery of empathetic, human-centric experiences that drive both customer and commercial outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Vision

• Define Al Tayer Insignia's experience design vision and multi-year roadmap, translating Customer Strategy into concrete design priorities across physical, digital, and phygital touchpoints.
• Set the design agenda for reinventing the experiential side of retail formats across all verticals and channels, including Department Stores, online flagships, Amber loyalty programme, and new concepts.
• Bridge customer experience, user experience, and user interface design where needed.

Practice Development & Governance

• Build the experience design function from scratch, establishing methodology, standards, tools, governance, and talent.
• Deploy Design Thinking methodologies and onboard key stakeholders to the approach.
• Govern associated investments, feeding design perspective into business cases and OKRs.
• Prove track record in designing and scaling a CX/XD practice.
• Pave the way for innovation through experiences.

Journey Design & Service Design

• Own end-to-end journey mapping and service design across the full customer lifecycle.
• Connect strategy to CX design, UX to UI across all phases of end-to-end customer journeys.
• Turn customer intelligence, trends, and journey insight into design interventions that shape differentiation and preference for portfolio brands, the loyalty programme, and customers.
• Design signature moments that balance creative differentiation with commercial impact.
• Partner with the Customer Intelligence team around behavioural personas, trends, insights, concept testing, and customer co-creation.
• Partner with relevant teams to track and continuously improve key journeys with clear ownership at each stage.

Stakeholder Management & Collaboration

• Effectively partner with all business verticals and brand stakeholders beyond CX and Marketing functions to support their strategic ambitions.
• Collaborate successfully with Digital and product teams, IT teams, and other enabling functions.
• Engage with store teams, customer care teams, and other customer-facing roles to design in context and with focus on relevance.
• Partner cross-functionally with brand and vertical stakeholders to align design work to their priorities.
• Work closely with tech-enabling functions such as Digital and IT to ensure designs are technically feasible and implemented.
• Work closely with store teams, customer care, and front-line teams to keep design grounded in operational reality and connected with their needs.
• Influence and inspire stakeholders, ensuring a culture of experience design emerges beyond the team.

People Management & Development

• Manage the Experience Design unit and drive systematic collaboration with relevant teams.
• Coach on both the craft of experience design and prototyping, and strategic, brand-led thinking.
• Demonstrate proven track record in knowledge sharing, inspiration, influence, and culture shaping.

Qualifications & Experience

• 8–10+ years in experience design or service design, ideally in luxury retail, hospitality, or premium omnichannel environments.
• Retail experience mandatory.

Skills & Competencies

• Proven fluency in Design Frameworks, Experience Design, and UX Design.
• Strong ability to bridge business strategy, creative design, trends analysis, brand strategy, and financial outcomes through experience design.
• Ability to operate at strategic level, unlocking key decisions with senior stakeholders while continuously contributing to hands-on craft and guiding the team.
• Outstanding collaboration abilities.
• Proven track record in knowledge sharing, inspiration, influence, and culture shaping.