Director, Customer Service - Order to Cash

Role Summary

The Director, Order-to-Cash - CT leads the transformation and sustained performance of CT’s end-to-end order-to-cash process. The role is accountable for delivering an industry-leading customer and internal user experience and improving financial outcomes, including invoice accuracy, payment speed, revenue realization, operating efficiency, and overdue receivables attributable to billing or payment issues.

The Director leads Product, CLC Finance, FSS, technology, Service, Sales, and other stakeholders as one team. Using data and analysis, the Director establishes CT’s order-to-cash strategy, process and policy priorities, shared goals and measures, and improvement roadmap. The Director is the decision owner for CT’s order-to-cash improvement roadmap: resolving competing recommendations and deciding which improvements to prioritize, pilot, advance, change, or stop. Partner functions are accountable for providing input and carrying out those decisions within their areas and meeting their agreed commitments. Functional leaders retain authority over their people, budgets, systems, and controls.

FSS owns accounts receivable (AR), payment application, and collections, including the associated operations and systems. The Director works closely with FSS to address CT issues that affect customers’ ability or willingness to pay and to support faster collections and cash application. FSS retains responsibility for execution within its remit. The Director follows global policies and processes and uses global systems, such as BlackLine, wherever possible. If doing so would create a financial downside for CLC, the Director works with FSS to justify and align on any variation. The Director provides input to FSS’s roadmap and policies but does not hold final decision rights over them.

The role has two direct reports and is supported by partners in Product, FSS, CLC Finance, Global Technology Services, DXG, GBS, and CLC Service and Sales. These functions align with the Director on how the team will operate, help shape initiatives, and commit the resources, deliverables, milestones, and performance measures needed to execute decisions. The initial mandate is limited to CT, CLC’s largest and most complex brand. The remit may expand to other CLC brands if the approach delivers the desired results.

Key Duties

- Set the strategy and make improvement decisions. Define CT’s order-to-cash strategy, shared performance targets, and priorities with Product, FSS, CLC Finance, and other stakeholders. Seek input from the teams responsible for each part of the process, resolve competing recommendations, and make and enforce decisions on CT improvements based on customer and financial impact. Set CT process and policy direction within applicable global requirements, and work with the responsible functions to implement decisions. Align with global systems and processes wherever practical and apply relevant practices from other business units and divisions.
- Build and govern the roadmap. Maintain a prioritized roadmap covering projects and ongoing improvements. For each initiative, document one accountable owner, contributors, decision rights, committed capacity, milestones, dependencies, target benefits, success measures, an escalation path, and the scope and owner of ongoing maintenance. Agree on delivery owners and timing with functional leaders. Monitor dependencies and enforce milestones through a defined review cadence; confirm required milestones and results before work advances through an implementation gate or closes. Escalate unresolved ownership, resource, or decision gaps promptly with a recommended resolution.
- Identify customer and operational problems. Maintain an order-to-cash customer journey map by CT customer segment, channel, and revenue model, including subscriptions and à la carte transactions. Analyze customer feedback and complaints, internal requests, invoice and payment data, disputes, collections information, and AR aging to identify root causes and opportunities. Examine issues such as invoice accuracy and delivery, payment friction, and unapplied or misapplied payments. Use these findings to inform the strategy and improvement roadmap.
- Assess Product-led commercial proposals. Product brings proposals for pricing changes, discount programs and policies, bundles and packaging, billing and payment models, and new product setup, with a customer and market rationale and forecast revenue impact from new sales or retention. This applies to direct-to-market offerings and Partnerships. With platform owners, FSS, CLC Finance, and other relevant teams, assess feasibility, required system or process changes, and implementation cost and complexity. Recommend a workable solution, including an alternative approach when appropriate, and develop a business case with Product that has an expected positive financial return and defined measures of success.
- Improve policies, processes, and receivables outcomes. Work with Product, FSS, CLC Finance, Legal, and other relevant functions to review order-to-cash policies, processes, and customer contract language. Decide on CT improvements within the Director’s authority and oversee their implementation, including changes that improve efficiency. Serve as FSS’s primary CT contact for aligning data, sharing insights, and coordinating action on issues that contribute to overdue AR, slow cash application, or collection challenges. Identify opportunities with FSS to speed collections and provide CT input to relevant FSS policies and roadmap decisions.
- Drive implementation and adoption. Decide when a pilot is needed to understand material risk before broader implementation. Oversee coordinated technical and operational delivery of approved changes, with CLC Project Management support when needed. Follow the CLC project process; ensure timely, accurate reporting of progress, risks, and decisions; and work with Product, FSS, Service, and Sales on effective internal and external communications and training.
- Measure results and require corrective action. Maintain a simple, timely, and accurate CT scorecard with agreed data definitions, data owners, and reporting deadlines. Track customer and user feedback, billing and payment quality, overdue AR linked to billing or payment issues, payment speed, revenue impact, efficiency, and completed improvements. Report relevant customer and financial results by segment, channel, and revenue model. Assess performance against business cases and shared targets; for material gaps, require a corrective action owner and due date, review progress to closure, and escalate unresolved issues. Decide whether initiatives should continue as planned, change, or stop, and use results to identify further phases of improvement.

Required Skills and Experience

- Minimum 10 years of progressive experience in finance operations, billing, or business process improvement, including at least five years leading order-to-cash design, improvement, or transformation. Brings deep subject matter expertise across the process—from order setup and billing through receivables, payment application, collections, and revenue realization—in a complex B2B business with subscription and transactional revenue.
- Experience leading at least one end-to-end order-to-cash transformation, from assessing the current process and aligning stakeholders through process and system changes, launch, stabilization, and measurable results.
- Working experience with ERP systems and Salesforce, and the ability to assess how commercial proposals affect billing, payments, receivables, controls, implementation cost, and financial returns.
- Experience improving order-to-cash controls, with an understanding of the control objectives and the ability to work with the functions that own those controls.
- Proven ability to make decisions and drive accountability across Product, Sales, Service, Finance, shared services, and technology teams without direct authority over each team.
- Strong customer journey and root-cause analysis skills, financial judgment, and clear communication with operational teams and senior leaders.

Direct Reports

- Order-to-cash process and improvement lead: Owns journey and process maps, the issue and root-cause backlog, handoffs, pilots, and follow-through across initiatives.
- Order-to-cash data and performance lead: Connects transaction, entity, invoice, payment, dispute, and AR data; defines measures; identifies patterns; and verifies whether changes worked.

Accountabilities of Supporting Functions

For every approved initiative, partner teams commit named owners and contributors, capacity, milestones, and success measures. Owners document decisions, report progress and risks on the agreed cadence, meet committed dates, and escalate problems early. When a commitment is at risk, they help resolve the issue and propose corrective action. Functional leaders resolve resource and priority conflicts within their teams and ensure their teams carry out decisions within the Director’s CT order-to-cash authority.

- CLC Product Managers own commercial proposals, customer and market rationale, and revenue forecasts. They channel requests from Sales and Partnerships with the same supporting rationale and involve the order-to-cash team early enough to establish that new offers can be billed reliably.
- CLC Project Managers manage delivery plans, dependencies, risks, and reporting for approved initiatives.
- FSS AR, payment application, and collections leaders own their daily operations, controls, staffing, and service levels. They bring CT issues and operational evidence to the joint team and implement agreed changes within FSS’s remit.
- Platform and data owners for E1, Arrow, Salesforce, and integrations , residing within Product, assess feasibility and cost, reserve delivery capacity, and own technical design and implementation. Global Technology Services and DXG participate as appropriate and implement changes in these systems.
- CLC Finance provides financial analysis and data to evaluate proposed investments, assist in building business cases, and measure outcomes.
- CLC Service and Sales , including the CTOC team (provides white glove support to selected customers) and others in Service, Sales Enablement (assists selected customers on an ad hoc basis to resolve billing questions) and others in Sales surface positive and negative customer feedback through Product or directly when asked. They help implement relevant system and process changes.
- Other Stakeholders: The Director may engage other teams such as Legal and Data & Analytics (DnA), to inform decisions and gather insight.

Travel

Up to 10% domestic travel.

Location

Strong preference for a hybrid worker (minimum of 8 times a month in-office) out of the New York City office.

Our Interview Practices

To maintain a fair and genuine hiring process, we kindly ask that all candidates participate in interviews without the assistance of AI tools or external prompts. Our interview process is designed to assess your individual skills, experiences, and communication style. We value authenticity and want to ensure we’re getting to know you—not a digital assistant. To help maintain this integrity, we ask to remove virtual backgrounds and include in-person interviews in our hiring process. Please note that use of AI-generated responses or third-party support during interviews will be grounds for disqualification from the recruitment process.

Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.

Compensation:
$140,800.00 - $251,500.00 USD
This role is eligible for Bonus.

Compensation range listed is based on primary location of the position.  Actual base salary offer is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skills, experience and actual hiring location. Your recruiter can share more information about the specific offer for the job location during the hiring process.

Additional Information :

Wolters Kluwer offers a wide variety of competitive benefits and programs to help meet your needs and balance your work and personal life, including but not limited to: Medical, Dental, & Vision Plans, 401(k), FSA/HSA, Commuter Benefits, Tuition Assistance Plan, Vacation and Sick Time, and Paid Parental Leave. Full details of our benefits are available upon request.