Grey Wood

Grey Wood has more than 30 years of business and technology leadership experience with organizations in healthcare, finance, insurance, education, consumer electronics, communications, and other industries. His passion at Clear Harbor is to create a business environment where our people can thrive in reflecting and protecting the brands of our clients. This includes innovative workforce learning and development, institution of standard protocols and best practices, measurement of results, and continuous innovation to meet changing client needs and growing customer expectations.

Grey joined Clear Harbor as CEO in 2010. Traditional BPO competitors of Clear Harbor, he discovered, were primarily built around high-volume, commodity services and low prices. Services were poorly delivered on the opposite side of the globe, in highly saturated, high-attrition markets that were inconvenient and unsafe to travel to. These “big box” outsourcers typically sought out the simplest, SLA-governed tasks, with little or no attention paid to the brand or customer experience.

Grey and his team saw evidence that the customer care market was changing, with consumers across all industries having growing expectations of brands, coupled with unprecedented consumer power, through social media, to make brands pay more attention to their demands. Gartner and other analysts predicted the customer experience would ultimately eclipse product and price as the most important aspect of a brand. Grey saw opportunity for a different kind of service provider to succeed and flourish with important brands.

With the right type of service model, Grey knew Clear Harbor could do a better job than the big box BPOs with clients that are highly motivated by brand reputation, customer loyalty and longevity. The team developed a “strategy and brand mirroring” approach to customer care built around total cost of brand ownership (TCBO), focusing not only on volume and price, but on ALL factors that can impact a client’s brand value.

The pillars around which the Clear Harbor brand reflection operating model is built have become Grey’s most important priorities. These include:

• Ensuring Clear Harbor has an in-depth understanding of each client’s business and their potential long-term fit as a customer
• Selecting safe operating locations, with strong labor pools, that support a brand reflection business model
• Finding the right people who are a good fit for client programs
• Providing a collaborative work environment where people do not just punch a clock, but build careers doing work they enjoy
• Delivering learning programs that put agents on a path to client “brand mastery”
• Establishing management operations that incorporate performance visibility, measurement and optimization, calibration, continuous improvement, standard protocols, and best practices
• Overseeing IT strategy that enhances productivity while ensuring privacy, security, compliance, business continuity, and interoperability with client processes and systems

Grey oversees every aspect of Clear Harbor efforts to solve the problems of traditional outsourcing while providing an excellent employee and customer experience. He is ultimately responsible for making sure we equip, prepare, and empower each individual agent, in each client program, to precisely reflect a brand’s identity and values in every customer interaction.

Grey is instrumental in helping to evaluate prospective clients to determine whether they are a good fit for Clear Harbor. It’s important to align with brands who share our philosophy and want an interactive, consultative partner in customer care. Grey leans toward client programs that are more challenging but that have potential for long-term success for our clients, employees, investors, etc.

Grey and his wife live near the Georgia coast. Grey enjoys inshore and offshore fishing.