Bahrain
Twenty years, one pattern: customer service and contact functions from broken to elite, cost centre to revenue engine. As permanent executive, interim leader building turnkey from nothing, and embedded consultant in high-pressure turnarounds. The last two years: re-architecting these functions around GenAI and Agentic AI. At IAG, parent of British Airways and Iberia, I created the group’s digital customer vision a decade before AI existed: self-service, smarter CRM so customers never repeat themselves, BPO partners contracted on customer outcomes. Twelve partners became two; £38m in savings followed. At Rentokil Initial, I led the first logistics operation to tell customers what time their parcel would arrive, removing 50,000 calls a day, with real-time tracking, digital case-raising and GPS ending false-carding across 3,000 drivers. The sector copied it. That was a decade ago. At The Macallan, I built the global HNW consumer service model. Customer employee number one at D360 Bank, Saudi Arabia’s first digital-only bank: built from zero, 2m customers at 90%+ CSAT against a 500k target. In Bahrain, I built Total CX from scratch: an AI-powered BPO, sister company to Batelco within the Beyon group. 75 to 400+ FTE in 12 months, 150% revenue growth. Through Alvarez & Marsal, I led customer service, contact centre, CX, CRM and AI mandates for world-famous brands across airlines, travel, insurance, payments, MedTech and hospitality. I didn’t write decks and leave: I embedded, led teams, built operations, across sectors. Latest: Executive Director at Emirates NBD, designing GenAI and Agentic AI strategy across a 4,000+ agent organisation; before that, Global VP at MSC’s ultra-luxury Explora Journeys. Most people in this field are one thing: CX strategist, journey specialist, technology architect, or contact centre leader. I am the blend. I see where a brand needs to be in two years, not two months. I know the technology hands-on: CRM, CCaaS, WFM, quality, analytics, real-time agent assist. I stand in front of the toughest boards with the strategy and the commercial case, then inspire whole companies to believe and move. The 46 recommendations here, chairmen to frontline advisers, say the same: inspirational, relentless, would work with again. Working GenAI prototypes for cruise and banking at epiccsx.com, and a feature film of agentic luxury cruising. Selectively exploring Group CX, Chief Customer Officer & customer transformation mandates worldwide, in active conversations regarding senior CX leadership. Globally mobile, no geographic restriction.
EPIC CSX is my executive practice for embedded customer experience, customer service and contact centre leadership. I take senior mandates inside the business, owning direction, delivery and outcomes as part of the leadership team, not advising from the sidelines. Engagements run on a permanent, interim or fractional basis. I lead from the front of the curve. The contact, service, sales and experience discipline is being reshaped by GenAI and Agentic AI faster than at any point in my 20+ years, and a leader who only talks about it is already behind. So I have gone deep and hands-on, to stay at the leading edge of customer contact, service, sales and experience leadership and innovation, and to know exactly what the technology can and cannot do across a live service journey before I ask a team or a board to back it. That work is built, not theorised, in my two core domains: - A full GenAI walkthrough and concept film for luxury cruising guest experience, orchestrating personalised service across the entire journey - A working GenAI prototype for Shariah-compliant retail banking, applying the same orchestration in a regulated, culturally specific market - A dedicated site that hosts both, so the work can be seen and tested, not just described This sits on 20+ years building, fixing and scaling service organisations across financial services, travel and aviation, luxury, telecoms, logistics and BPO, in 30+ countries, from 20-person start-ups to global networks of 4,000+. The constant is operating leadership: contact centre and service turnarounds, greenfield builds, CCaaS, CRM and workforce modernisation, and BPO and shared-services reset, always measured in cost-to-serve, CSAT, NPS, conversion and retention. I am globally mobile with no geographic restriction, selectively exploring Group CX, Chief Customer Officer and customer transformation roles, and in active conversations regarding senior CX leadership.
Senior strategic mandate at one of the region's largest banking groups, brought in to architect the 4,000 FTE Contact Centre GenAI and Agentic AI strategy across Emirates NBD and Emirates Islamic. The strategy committed to 40% OPEX reduction through self-service containment and intelligent routing improvements, 10% acquisition uplift across credit cards, account openings and loans, and CSAT improvement of 5%+, alongside the operating model, complaint-management redesign and leadership structure needed to deliver it. Every commitment modelled against the realities of a complex regulated environment, including the operational disciplines of Sharia-compliant banking. Led the design of the migration from legacy Avaya to full Agentic AI and GenAI across live operations at both Emirates NBD and Emirates Islamic. Core features included natural language recognition in English and Arabic, and multiple new straight-through processing (STP) flows for common service and sales journeys. Defined the Genesys GenAI roadmap covering Agent co-pilot, Next Best Action (NBA), real-time analytics, and the transition from 20 random manual audits per agent per month to 100% GenAI-enabled post-interaction Quality Management across the entire contact operation. Reset strategic priorities and handed over a fully costed, business-case-approved GenAI and Agentic AI roadmap for the Contact Centre and wider customer operation to the permanent team.
Embedded transformation mandate at a premium luxury cruise brand, reporting to the President, combining stabilisation of a global guest contact operation with the design of its strategic GenAI-enabled future state. On arrival, abandonment had been running above 10% for several weeks across the global Ambassador team. Assumed direct operational line management of the international sites and brought the abandonment rate under 5% within the stabilisation window, alongside strengthening Quality Assurance, training, workforce optimisation, reporting and role design to improve service consistency, sales conversion and operational control. In parallel, built the go-forward strategy: a full digital strategy and a GenAI strategy on Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein with a clear migration path to AgentForce across live operations, alongside greenfield implementations of Workforce Management (WFM), Quality Management (QM) and Performance Management on modern GenAI-enabled Contact Centre and CX platforms. Shaped the end-to-end guest contact experience from pre-booking enquiry through post-voyage follow-up. The operating principles signposted here were subsequently reimagined at far greater depth in the 14-chapter EPIC CSX Interactive Walkthrough. Recruited the core Ambassador Operations Leadership team and handed over the permanent operating structure before completing the mandate.
Chief Executive Customer Officer of Total CX, the Beyon Group BPO. Built and scaled a greenfield contact centre and customer operation from 75 to 400+ FTE in 12 months, with full accountability for service delivery, workforce management, quality assurance, reporting, cost control and the leadership structure behind it. Delivered 150% revenue growth against plan. Led one of Bahrain's largest outsourced customer operations, serving enterprise clients across food delivery, digital banking, utilities and telecoms (Batelco). Scope included order and delivery issues, app support, onboarding, complaints, refunds, fraud-related cases, merchant and menu complexity, and regulated banking service flows. Standardised the technology stack across the entire operation: Oracle, Freshworks and Cisco for service delivery, Calabrio for Workforce Management and Quality Management, with consistent KPI scorecards, performance management routines and frontline coaching disciplines across every client line. Led the Batelco integration personally, ensuring seamless operational handoff between their front-end Virtual Assistant, Basma, and the live Customer Contact Operation serving regulated telecoms customers. Managed transition activity from incumbent providers, built the planning, productivity control and commercial discipline expected in an outsourced model where every resource line had to be justified. Embedded AI-assisted workflows, intelligent routing and smarter contact handling to improve containment, productivity, complaint routing and service economics at high volume.
Global Customer Service Experience Director at Alvarez & Marsal, leading embedded customer operations and contact centre transformation assignments across travel, banking, telecoms, SaaS and B2B service environments in EMEA, APAC and the Americas. Delivered 12+ distinct client engagements across the tenure, ranging from short-term stabilisation mandates through to multi-year end-to-end transformation programmes. Delivery model throughout was embedded rather than advisory: taking direct operational accountability for service outcomes, running the day-to-day alongside client leadership, and handing over a genuinely stronger operation at the end of each mandate rather than a deck and a set of recommendations. Two of those engagements carried particular scale. A two-year travel-sector assignment for a confidential client, with frequent delivery work based from Chennai, focused on improving service operations, workflows, governance and execution discipline across a complex multi-market contact operation. Via a parallel secondment to ATPI, worked directly with operations in Mumbai and Chennai on a major contact centre redesign and CRM modernisation programme, with the headline commercial and operational outcomes captured on the ATPI entry below. The consistent thread across every engagement was the same operating principle: Customer Contact, Service and Experience as one connected operating model, commercial outcomes designed into the service rather than bolted on, and the operational grip and leadership discipline needed to deliver against a business case. Many of the operating principles later codified in the EPIC CSX framework were road-tested across these engagements. Platforms in scope across engagements: Genesys, NICE CXone, Salesforce Service Cloud, Amazon Connect, Zendesk, Microsoft Dynamics, alongside core CRM, WFM, QM and analytics tooling.