Customer Insights Manager
About us
At Halfords, our mission is to inspire and support a lifetime of motoring and cycling. As a specialist retailer, we lead the market through customer-driven innovation and a distinct product range. We are dedicated to providing our customers with an integrated, unique, and convenient service experience—from e-bike and electric vehicle servicing to on-demand solutions. Our commitment is to foster customer loyalty by offering compelling reasons to keep coming back to our stores, ensuring a lifetime of motoring and cycling enjoyment.
The teams at our Redditch Support Centre work with every other area of our business, putting them at the heart of the action and playing a key role in our success and growth. Everyone brings their individual knowledge and experience to work every day, working as one team to keep things moving smoothly.
If you’re willing to get stuck in, you’ll love it here too. So put yourself at the heart of a dynamic, fast-paced working environment where expertise and focus take people far.
About the role
At Halfords, we’re entering a pivotal period. Over the next 12–18 months decisions will shape who we serve, how we compete, and where we place our biggest commercial bets. This role exists to ensure those decisions are grounded in clear, trusted customer understanding – used early, used well, and used honestly.
As Customer Insight Manager, you’ll lead the customer insight capability that informs marketing, category and proposition decisions across Halfords. You’ll be the steward of our core customer insight assets and our customer insight partner ecosystem, acting as a trusted partner to senior stakeholders and external agencies alike.
This is role for someone who cares deeply about decision quality, understands the limits of evidence, and can confidently say “here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t, and here’s how confident we should be.”
You’ll work closely with other embedded specialists across the organisation, contributing deep customer understanding into a wider decision-led insight system, while remaining accountable for the strength, usability and credibility of customer insight itself. This role will champion the voice of the customer across the business and synthesise internal and external insights that enable better customer driven decision making across the business.
Key responsibilities
The quality, relevance and robustness of customer insight used in marketing, category and proposition decisions
Ownership and stewardship of shared customer insight assets (e.g. segmentation, trackers, panels)
Strategic leadership of external customer insight partners, ensuring they are focused on the decisions that matter most
Transparency and trust: clear visibility of where insight is strong, limited, ageing or incomplete
Lead customer research that directly supports real business decisions, not just outputs
Own and shape relationships with external insight partners, ensuring:
briefs are decision-led and proportionate
partners understand Halfords’ strategy and priorities
work is clearly interpretable, actionable and honest about limitations
Maintain and evolve core insight assets, ensuring stakeholders understand:
what they can and cannot answer
where evidence is becoming dated or incomplete
Ensure insight is decision-grade: clear, synthesised and framed around implications and trade-offs
Support activation and learning, tracking what happens after decisions and explaining what worked (or didn’t)
Partner with the embedded insight specialists across the organisation to align insight assets and partner activity to enterprise-critical priorities
Act as a confident, constructive voice in decision forums – bringing customer truth without over-claiming certainty
About you
Deep experience in customer insight, ideally in complex, multi-category or multi-channel environments
A strong track record of leading insight agencies as strategic partners, not just suppliers
Excellent judgement about evidence quality, trade-offs and proportionality
The ability to influence without authority, especially with senior stakeholders
A calm, credible style – comfortable holding the line when evidence is limited
Confidence working alongside analytics, CX, UX and partners without needing to manage them
A mindset shift from “producing insight” to “shaping decisions”
Reward & benefits
A fair and competitive salary evaluated against market data, annual discretionary bonus scheme, pension, life assurance, 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays and enhanced family leave.
Commitment and dedication to your ongoing personal and professional development. We help you to own and grow your potential so you can be at your best in your current role and to support your future career aspirations.
We offer hybrid working in our Support Centre, you will be based at our Support Centre 3 days a week with an optional 2 days working from home.
You will have access to a wealth of employee discounts across the Halfords suite of products and services.
Wellbeing and inclusion are at the heart of our colleague experience. We offer resources and ongoing support to enhance your wellbeing at work and active Colleague Networks supporting inclusion initiatives across Halfords.
Not sure you meet all the criteria? We'd encourage you to take the wheel and apply anyway! At Halfords we are committed to creating an inclusive workplace for our colleagues. We're an equal opportunities employer and proud to welcome applications from all backgrounds and embrace diversity within our one Halfords Family.
At Halfords, we operate a hybrid working policy with 3 days on site at our Support Centre in Redditch.
