Two decades in customer support

​

I came up through customer support at a time when it was still seen as a cost centre — somewhere that received complaints and minimised their impact on the business. What drew me to it was what kept me in it for 20 years: the conviction that customer support, done well, is one of the most strategic functions in any business. It's where customers feel what the company actually values. It's where churn is decided. It's where product feedback actually lives.

​

I've led support operations at Dell SonicWALL (EMEA Technical Support Services, 41 managers across multiple geographies), Ivanti (EMEA Technical Services across a multi-lingual team maintaining 95%+ CSAT), Snow Software (Senior Director of Global Customer Support, building their first global function — 62 people across three continents, lifting CSAT from 61% to 94%, reducing support-related churn by 18%), and most recently British Airways, leading the transition of network operations from outsourced suppliers back in-house across 500+ global sites including Heathrow and Gatwick.

​

Within those roles, I've built multi-hub operations globally, managed BPO partnerships across off-shore, near-shore, and hybrid delivery models, managed service desks, MSP, multi-lingual teams, and turned more than one customer support function from a reactive cost line into a genuine driver of retention, referrals, and product improvement.

​

The through-line across all of it has been the same principle: every customer interaction is either building the business or quietly eroding it. Good customer support operations make that tilt visible, measurable, and positive.

​

​

What I believe about customer support in the AI era

​

AI holds the biggest shift in customer support in a generation. It's also where most organisations are making decisions they'll regret.

​

Three things I believe strongly:

​

AI is a tool, not a strategy. The companies that will succeed with AI in customer support are the ones that treat it as an input to a well-run operation — not as a replacement for one. AI amplifies whatever is already there. If the foundations are strong, AI transforms what's possible. If they're weak, AI amplifies the weakness at scale.

​

Business outcomes and customer outcomes aren't in tension — but they can feel like they are. The temptation with AI is to chase deflection, cost savings, and efficiency at the expense of the customer experience. Done well, AI does both. Done badly, it erodes the second while only marginally improving the first. The difference is operational judgement.

​

The people who've actually led customer support have something the AI vendors don't. I'm not anti-vendor — AI tooling is genuinely valuable, and the pace of innovation in the space is impressive. But operational judgement about how customer support actually works, where demand comes from, how knowledge flows, how teams respond, and how customer voice feeds back into product — that's not something you learn from a product demo. It's the layer AI has to sit within to succeed.

​

That last belief is why I set up CS Cloud Consulting. There's a gap between the promise of AI in customer support and its delivery. Operational experience is what closes it.

​

​

Outside of work

​

I'm based in Hampshire, with my wife and our two sons (14 and 18).

When I'm not working with clients, I'm usually fixing something. I restore 90s mountain bikes, repair our own, and spend weekends on the trails in the open country around home. I track my car regularly at Goodwood — motorsport has been a long-standing interest, and there's something about the discipline of reading a circuit under pressure that carries over into how I think about operational work.

​

Most of what I enjoy outside of consulting has the same thread running through it: working out how systems should function, and either making them work or fixing them when they don't. That's what drew me to customer support in the first place, and it's why I spend spare hours developing AI software and staying close to where the customer support industry is actually heading. The technology is moving fast. I'd rather be hands-on with it than reading about it from a distance.

​

​

Take the next step

​

If the positioning and approach described across this site sound like what you need — whether you've already got a brief or a rough sense that something isn't working — let's talk.

The first conversation is 30 minutes. No pitch, no deck. Just a direct exchange on what you're facing and whether this fits.

​