Alex Mead | The record: 25 years running customer operations

In plain terms

I am Alex Mead, a customer contact, service and experience transformation executive with more than twenty years in the role, across banking, aviation, luxury cruise, business process outsourcing, business travel management, premium travel, technology and field services. I have run regulated banking contact operations of 4,000+ FTE, built a Saudi digital bank's customer operation from zero, consolidated nine outsource partners and 3,000+ agents into two inside an airline group, and carried the P&L of a greenfield BPO. I work at the point where customer contact, service, sales and experience meet the technology underneath them: CRM, CCaaS, workforce engagement and workforce optimisation, and the integration into real-time and post-interaction back-end systems. I am British, based in Bahrain, mobile worldwide, and available now for a Chief Customer Officer, VP, Director or Head of Customer Contact, Service and Experience appointment. A permanent appointment is what I am looking for, and interim is genuinely open.

The employers, in order: Emirates NBD, Explora Journeys in the MSC Group, Total CX in the Beyon Group, Alvarez & Marsal, D360 Bank, Edrington including The Macallan, ATPI, IAG the British Airways group, Golfbreaks.com, Rentokil Initial and City Link, Ticketmaster and Seatwave, 1&1 IONOS with Fasthosts, SpinVox which later became Nuance, and Travelsphere, and Barclays.

I hold full P&L and operating authority in every recent role, and I am now the practitioner defining how AI and agentic automation actually get built, bought and deployed inside large customer organisations, not just advising on it from the outside.

Alex Mead

The track record. Named, dated, with the basis of each engagement stated.

Every number below belongs to one role in one organisation. None of it is a career total. Where a mandate was delivered through Alvarez & Marsal, it says so.

Mar 2026 – present

EPIC CSX

Executive Director, Customer Contact, Service & Experience

Own vehicle · deliberate interlude

Six months taken deliberately to build deep, practical GenAI capability in customer operations rather than talk about it. Three working prototypes came out of it: an AI-native Islamic bank, an ultra-luxury cruise brand, and a high-touch luxury safari and premium escorted-travel group across the Middle East and Africa. That work is finished. A permanent appointment is now the priority, and I am open to interim mandates alongside it.

Sep 2025 – Mar 2026

Emirates NBD

Executive Director, Customer Contact & Service Transformation

Interim

GenAI and agentic AI strategy for a 4,000+ FTE contact operation across two banks. Targets set at 40% OPEX reduction, 10% acquisition uplift and CSAT up 5 points. Avaya replaced by agentic AI, natural-language understanding in English and Arabic, and 20 manual audits per agent per month replaced by 100% GenAI post-interaction quality management. Completed INSEAD's AI Leadership Programme in Dubai during the mandate, November 2025.

Apr – Sep 2025

Explora Journeys (MSC Group)

Global VP Experience Centres & CX Strategy

Interim · reported to the President

Global ownership of the Experience Centres and the CX strategy for an ultra-luxury cruise brand inside the world's largest privately held cruise group, reporting to the President. Call abandonment above 10% brought below 5%.

Jan 2024 – Mar 2025

Total CX (Beyon Group)

Chief Executive Customer Officer

Full-time · full P&L

Grew a greenfield business process outsourcer from 75 to 400+ FTE in twelve months, with 150% revenue growth, holding the P&L.

Apr 2017 – Jan 2024

Alvarez & Marsal

Global Customer Service Experience Director

Seven years · embedded mandates

Twelve or more distinct client engagements through a leading global advisory group, six of them as interim leadership. On those six I held the operating role, ran the function and carried the numbers. I embedded, led teams and built operations rather than writing decks and leaving. Most are under NDA and cannot be named. The three I can name are the three rows below.

Nov 2020 – May 2022

D360 Bank

Executive Director, Customer Service Experience

Via Alvarez & Marsal

A PIF-backed Saudi digital bank built from zero. I was customer employee number one and built the entire customer service operation from scratch: I designed it, hired the teams, chose the technology and stood up a 150+ FTE contact centre. The launch target was 500,000 customers in six months. We reached 2 million in the first six months and passed 3 million within a year of launch, at 90%+ CSAT, with the lowest cost-to-serve of any bank in Saudi Arabia. Growth was that quick because I made every process slick on my EPIC framework: onboarding, account opening, money transfers, disputes, savings and loans.

Jul 2018 – Dec 2019

Edrington (The Macallan)

Global Consumer Experience Leader

Via Alvarez & Marsal

25% NPS uplift and 40%+ faster fulfilment, across around nine luxury spirits brands.

Apr 2017 – Jun 2018

ATPI

Group Customer Service Director

Interim · via Alvarez & Marsal

His first Alvarez & Marsal assignment: two weeks consulting, then around a year running it as interim leadership. £18m of OPEX savings and a 20% sales uplift, through contact-centre redesign and CRM modernisation, with delivery hubs in Mumbai and Chennai.

Apr 2014 – Apr 2017

IAG (British Airways group)

Global CX Transformation Leader

Payroll

£38m of annual operating cost removed. Nine outsource partners and 3,000+ agents consolidated to two. 4,000+ FTE across 12 sites and 20+ languages.

May 2015 – Oct 2016

Golfbreaks.com

Chief Customer Officer

Secondment from IAG

+12% booking conversion and 99% customer rebooking intent, through contact-centre redesign and CRM modernisation.

Dec 2010 – Mar 2014

Rentokil Initial (City Link)

Group Director, Customer Care & Contact Centres

Payroll

City Link alone was around 2,000 direct headcount across contact centres and depots, inside the wider Rentokil Initial global group of around 4,000, over 70+ sites and a field force of 3,000 drivers. £24m saved. The first logistics operation to give customers a delivery time, and a way to tell the depot when that time would not work, removing 50,000 calls a day across 3,000 drivers. The sector copied it. The harder half was behavioural. False carding, marking a delivery as attempted when no attempt was made, had to stop, so I settled the position with the CTO, the IT Director, the COO and the CFO first, then brought the GPS tracking data to all 74 depot general managers and 7 network directors in one room and worked with them to resolve it. The argument I made was commercial rather than moral: every forced delivery loses money, because you pay to go back and deliver it again. The second change was structural. Between 1,200 and 1,400 customer service people sat inside the depots reporting to their own depot general manager, which meant the people who saw a depot failing reported to the person whose depot it was. I persuaded the business to move them into my line, and virtualised them into one team serving the whole network rather than one depot. Successful delivery attempts rose at least 13% a day, and Rentokil Initial plc’s 2012 annual report records City Link achieving a 13% reduction in cost per delivery on volume growth of 17%. Abandonment above 90% turned into 90% of calls answered within 30 seconds, average speed of answer from eight minutes to under one, handling time down 25%, and a quarter of contact moved to voice self-service.

Apr 2008 – Nov 2010

Ticketmaster / Seatwave

VP Customer Service

Payroll

Customer service leadership across live entertainment ticketing and the secondary market, through the Seatwave period.

Feb 2005 – Mar 2008

1&1 IONOS

Chief Customer Officer & Global Operations Director

Payroll · three mandates in one period

One period covering three customer operations mandates. 1&1 and Fasthosts as Chief Customer Officer. SpinVox, later Nuance, as Director of Global Customer Operations: scaled from 100 to 4,000+ staff across 14 countries, with 12 clients onboarded. Travelsphere as Group Customer Service & Sales Director: direct-sales conversion up 15%, worth £7.5m.

Feb 2001 – Jan 2005

Barclays

Customer Service & Operations Director

Payroll

3,000 FTE, £15m saved, a 40% mortgage sales uplift and a regulatory rating moved from poor to good.

The mandates I cannot name

Twelve or more distinct client engagements through a leading global advisory group, six as interim leadership. Most are under NDA. Those six were operating roles across banking, travel, logistics and business services: I held the seat, ran the function and carried the numbers. I embedded, led teams and built operations rather than writing decks and leaving. The three clients I am free to name are D360 Bank, Edrington and ATPI, all above, with their results attached.

If you need the rest verified, ask me. I would rather have that conversation than publish a list I am not entitled to publish.

Twenty years, one pattern. The size changes but the standard doesn’t.

20+ years, one pattern: permanent executive, interim leader building from nothing, and embedded consultant in high-pressure turnarounds. The size changes but the standard doesn’t.

Three mandates since January 2024. Total CX was a full-time Chief Executive Customer Officer role with the P&L. Explora Journeys and Emirates NBD were interim by design: each needed an operating leader for a defined commercial or transformation outcome, and each got one. That is a deliberate sequence of executive mandates, not a sequence of exits, and the references are from the people I ran those operations with.

In 2026 I deliberately took six months to build deep, practical GenAI capability rather than talk about it. That is finished. No vendor, nothing to sell; in role this is built in your stack, to my vision.

That search is now the priority: I am firmly in the market for a leadership role, permanent or interim. A permanent seat is what I want, one brand, one mandate, and the conditions to build something that lasts. Where a mandate is interim, I take it on the same terms I always have.

If this is the track record you need, let's talk → Download my CV (PDF) ↓

Credentials and recognition

All third-party, all verifiable.

INSEAD · November 2025

AI Leadership Programme, completed in Dubai during my Emirates NBD mandate. AI leadership inside a large regulated customer organisation, not tooling.

Frost & Sullivan

Twice voted Global Customer Experience Thought Leader.

BSc · Engineering

Computer Systems and Information Engineering. It is why the CRM, CCaaS, WEM and WFO conversation is a working one rather than a vocabulary one.

Business Frontier · 2025

Excellence in Customer Experience.

European Customer Festival · 2016

Chairman.

ITIL

Foundation certified.

Forty-six references. Named, verbatim, verifiable.

Every LinkedIn recommendation I have received, from chairmen to frontline team members, across banking, cruise, travel, luxury, BPO and technology. Nothing edited, nothing cherry-picked. All 46 are published in full, and every one of them can be checked against my LinkedIn profile.

I placed Alex at CityLink/Rentokil. From the shortlist I created for this role Alex was the clear leader. An expert in his field combined with first class interpersonal skills made Alex the ideal candidate.
Sanjay Gohil · Partner, Board Practice · Wilton & Bain

Alex made an immediate impact at Explora Journeys by bringing a clear sense of purpose, control, and vision to the future of our Customer Experience strategy.
Carlos Insuasti · Director of Contact Center Sales & Operations · Cunard

He didn't entertain the normal corporate jargon you associate with customer experience practitioners but kept it all very simple with the customer always at the center.
Jon Wells · Director Customer Contact · Carnival UK (P&O Cruises & Cunard)

Alex is the first senior CX management staff that I have ever truly learned from in my career.
Mohammed AlManasef · Contact Center Senior Manager · D360 Bank

Read all 46, verbatim → Verify them on LinkedIn →

How I work

I had a working method long before GenAI arrived. EPIC CSX is the customer side: experiences that are Easy, Personalised, Intuitive and Contextual. TIME EX is the employee side: people need Time, Information, Motivation and Empowerment to deliver it. Both were built in 2012 and proven across six sectors long before generative AI existed. Since GenAI I have rebuilt both from scratch, and I know CRM, CCaaS, WEM, WFO and the integration into real-time and post-interaction back-end systems well enough to make the result run inside your stack rather than inside a slide.

The rare part, and the thing forty-six references keep saying in different words: I can roll my sleeves up and motivate frontline teams in the toughest circumstances, and I can hold a board's attention in the same week. Most customer leaders are one or the other.

The approach in full →

The through-line, documented

Customer experience formalised as a profession around 2009–2011: Forrester held its first dedicated Customer Experience Forum in 2009, and the CXPA was founded in 2011. At almost exactly that moment, Alex was being independently interviewed about two operational turnarounds, and saying, on the record, what would later be named EPIC.

Give customers easier ways to do simple things themselves, but when a human is needed, give that person the context, information and authority to do something useful.
Alex Mead · Frost & Sullivan Executive Interview · 2009, as VP Customer Service, Ticketmaster / Seatwave, thirteen years before ChatGPT

In 2011 he turned around Rentokil Initial’s global logistics customer operation, taking call abandonment above 90% below 10% and average speed to answer from over eight minutes to under one. He ended false carding and rebuilt the delivery promise around telling the customer a time. Rentokil Initial plc’s 2012 annual report records City Link achieving a 13% reduction in cost per delivery on volume growth of 17%, and says that following the successful introduction of customer care technology in City Link the group had begun rolling out best practice more widely.

Alex Mead interviewed on stage by Peter Coffee of Salesforce, 2012 — 2012: interviewed by Salesforce’s Peter Coffee on the Rentokil Initial turnaround.

Rentokil Initial 2011 turnaround evidence: abandonment above 90 percent to below 10, ASA over 8 minutes to under 1, cost per delivery down 13 percent, volume up 17 percent — The 2011 turnaround: operating metrics, with the plc-reported 2012 business impact.

EPIC before it was called EPIC. The principles came from running and fixing real operations, self-service that works, proactive information, channels behaving as one journey, no repetition, and employees with the context, information and authority to act. GenAI did not create them; it removed the last excuse for not delivering them at scale.

Read the full argument →

Three working prototypes, and what they are actually evidence of

These are not proof I can build. They are proof I can see an operating model that no brand is running today, and specify it precisely enough for it to be built inside your stack. The point is not the working prototypes. It is the level of critical thinking I used to create compelling visions that do not exist in any brand right now.

No vendor, nothing to sell; in role this is built in your stack, to my vision.

Regulated banking

An AI-native, Shariah-compliant Islamic bank with six customer channels behind a single compliance firewall, built to show what AI-orchestrated service looks like when the regulator is in the room.

Luxury cruise

A complete guest journey, from first enquiry to post-cruise, with AI and human specialists working as one team and no loss of context at any handover.

Luxury safari and escorted travel

A high-touch safari and premium escorted-travel operating model across the Middle East and Africa, for complex, high-value journeys booked direct and through advisors. The client is under NDA, so it is not published here.

Direct. No form.

I am available now for a Chief Customer Officer, VP, Director or Head of Customer Contact, Service and Experience role. A permanent appointment is what I am looking for, and interim is genuinely open. British, based in Bahrain, mobile worldwide, on-site from week one. If you are hiring for that seat, or you are a search partner with a brief that fits, the fastest route is a direct conversation.

alex@epiccsx.com +44 7916 125344 · UK +973 3604 7110 · Bahrain linkedin.com/in/alexmead