Simon Ray Email & Phone Number

Edinburgh, Gb

Edinburgh, Gb

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Creative Global Strategy Limited are experts in Customer Acquisition & Engagement, Journey Design and Orchestration, Contact Centre Transformation. Bringing over 20 years' experience in strategy development, process engineering & journey design, organisational design and program & platform implementation, my role is to help clients and partners develop meaningful, sustainable strategic approaches to their customer service transformation.

East Lothian, Scotland, United Kingdom

Responsible for ensuring the effective and efficient running of the Board of Trustees in setting a robust & achievable strategy, maintaining appropriate oversight, and supporting the operational leadership team in achieving the Foodbank's goals.

Building on over 20 years’ experience in strategy development and transformation at American Express, I offer bespoke consulting services to organisations of all sizes who are passionate about transforming their customers’ experience and journeys.

Brighton, United Kingdom

Promoted to senior leadership position, responsible for approx. 1,000 people overseeing and ensuring compliance to regulatory and policy requirements by the 27,000-strong Global Services Group. - Conceptualised, built & executed the first population-level regulatory testing program for customer servicing processes in American Express; simplified the testing regime by 95% and enabled a step change in process performance which resulted in a coveted Chairman’s Award for Innovation for the Global Disputes process. - Leveraged this ecosystem to identify and respond to evolving business risks associated with regulatory expectations, the COVID pandemic, and internal compliance findings. - Played pivotal cross-functional roles, providing consultative support to UK head of servicing in meeting uplifted regulatory expectations; creating unique partnerships with internal audit, operations and technology; and representing GSG in 3 legal entity committees and 2 Enterprise subcommittees, including as signatory on all New Product Approvals globally.

Brighton, United Kingdom

Leading a team of data scientists, analysts and project managers responsible for driving improvements to call centre processes & platforms, and delivering the next generation of customer service infrastructure - Created a globally flexible organisation to leverage knowledge and investments across markets; ensuring delivery of $40MM+ annual cost reduction targets while driving accountability for customer experience metrics in addition to operating expense, ensuring alignment to stakeholder goals.- Created a Strengths-based operating model, with roles defined around individual abilities & preferences; transformed colleague survey results [88% Engagement (+4% vs leader), 89% Leadership (+6% vs leader), 86% Learning & Career Development (+5% vs leader)], and enabled rapid pivots to evolving demands on the team, creating a model for success which continues to grow globally. - Established a transformational program to use big data within process engineering, creating a team dedicated to producing insights across servicing channels, enabling improved end-to-end customer experience and empowering the customer service organisation to directly influence digital product development. - Partnered with Technology and Capabilities organisations and senior leadership to establish strategy and business case to transform our communications ecosystem, resulting in multi-year investment & global rollout. Led delivery of UK launch.

Promoted to lead a new multi-disciplinary organisation responsible for ensuring recruitment & retention of the right people, incentivisation of the right behaviours & outcomes, and consistent oversight of those outcomes. - Formulated and executed upon a strategy to create an incentives centre of excellence overseeing a multi-million dollar budget, eliminating budget overruns, and reinforcing linkages between expenditure and business results.- Formulated and executed upon a strategy to create an Employee Strategy centre of excellence, resulting in: consistent hiring & retention practices globally; a centralised Leave of Absence function across US sites; globally defined Team Leader role; and the creation of a dedicated coaching organisation - Refocused the ethos of the operational risk management team on placing regulatory compliance at the heart of the customer experience journey, leading to all-time high performance Health of Compliance, improved customer outcomes (handling times, callbacks and complaints) and transformed internal audit performance.

Promoted to a new role, responsible for defining the future footprint of the global servicing network through effective research, medium-term strategic planning, and a robust short-term pipeline of rightshoring projects.- Developed strategies which resulted in the migration of 3,500 roles and led to the creation of new servicing sites, expansion of Home Based Servicing and of our existing servicing hubs, and extensive consolidation of the vendor network, delivering $150MM annualised saves over 3 years, while maintaining or improving customer outcomes and business continuity.- Directly supported global Group President in developing long term servicing strategy for post-digital era, incorporating potential volume trends, call type changes, multiple potential designs for the global servicing footprint, future investment needs and long-term cost benefit forecasts.

- Organisational strategy development - Delivery of strategic outsourcing initiatives - Delivery of strategic restructuring and nearshoring projects

Managing implementation of a range of projects, spanning product launches, MI and data management standardisation within the internal project management team, and internal restructuring of 7 PMO organisations into a single department.

Management of projects covering process reengineering, EMV standards implementation, product launches, website launches, and outsourcing projects to offshore and nearshore vendors, for EMEA-based markets.

Delivering translation and interpretation services for a range of clients including IBM and Sussex Police.