Who we are

The core team at ABCG are experienced board level operators, have knowledge of the challenges facing organisations today, with a proven and impressive track record of transforming customer experience. We engage with subject matter experts to ensure we deliver you the best solution to support your organisations requirements.

Mike AshtonManaging Director

Mike’s core expertise is in brand strategy, customer experience, international marketing and change management.

8 years on the board of Hilton International:

Senior Vice President Marketing & Brand Management
Led the Hilton brand to No. 1 in every major international market
Winner of two National Business Awards for marketing strategy

20 years in senior commercial management:

Procter & Gamble – 8 years in senior sales management
Johnson & Johnson – Head of European Marketing
ScotRail – Marketing & Sales Director
Stakis Group – Group Marketing Director

Regular keynote speaker at conferences in the UK, Europe and the US
Mike has an MBA and is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM)

Carl DaviesBusiness Development Director

Carl is a Procter & Gamble trained professional who went on to set up and run MeridianISE Consulting, an international management consultancy for over 15 years.

MeridianISE Management Consulting specialised in Sales and Marketing for large Blue Chip organisations across the globe, with 30+ consultants working from offices in London and Chicago.

Carl has spent the last 20+ years running his own businesses as a Founder/Owner/Entrepreneur and also performs a number of advisory & NED roles.

“My passion is helping clients succeed; which means growing revenue and profitability. For me this involves giving customers and consumers a great service and experience so that they come back time and time again and they tell all their friends and colleagues. I have known Mike Ashton for a number of years and having P&G in our veins means we always come at issues from the Customer’s perspective. Mike’s experience and success at Hilton on Customer Experience echoed many of the challenges we faced with our clients and so we started to share our experiences and frustrations. We knew two things were essential for excellent CX; strong, aligned leadership; and behavioural change across the organisation. This resulted in us developing the Cascade™ and ThreeSixty™ programmes which we are really proud and excited to launch. In addition to my love of work I am a Lord’s Taverner and, with my charity committee, have raised over £2m for disadvantaged children in Middlesex. I have been married for 26 years and have two grown up children and a puppy”

Andy SpellerCustomer Services Director

Andy has 20+ years’ experience in sales, marketing & customer service having enjoyed working for many high growth businesses

Andy has a passion for making businesses thrive in the B2B sector. During his early career he joined Energis, a telecommunications start-up that grew rapidly, eventually reaching the giddy heights of the FTSE 100. Andy’s part in this journey was to develop high performance sales & marketing teams that came to dominate their target sectors.

More recently he served as Managing Director of a UK travel company, successfully turning the business around and delivering rapid growth in profitability that eventually led to the attraction of private equity investors. During this period the company won numerous industry awards for customer service and experience.

He believes that employee engagement in delivering a total customer experience is the key to success. The days of top-down direction management direction are long gone. Successful businesses have a culture of customer excellence that pervades the whole organisation – management’s role is to create the opportunity for this culture to develop.

Kate FranklinChief Customer Officer

Kate advises and supports organisations across a range of sectors and geographies to create value and differentiation through ‘outside in” thinking and deployment of practical solutions to improve customer engagement and loyalty. These range from ‘point based’ solving of obvious business issues, to longer-term commitment to systemic and sustained customer experience transformation.

Kate has specialised in Customer Experiece consulting for the last 6 years, and until its sale to the US in 2015, was one of a small, pioneering team that became the largest international specialist consultancy, delivering what Forrester’s analysts cited repeatedly as best practice solutions. Prior to her consulting career she was Marketing and Ecommerce Director for two UK High Street retailers, Sales and Marketing Director for a UK train operating company, and Group Customer Services Director for a large London-based property management and development business.

She has expertise across a broad range of functions from brand and marketing communications to transformation programmes in customer service, contact and retail/housing operations. Throughout her career she has been responsible for delivering directly to the customer so has extensive practical knowledge around customer experience and engagement.