3 continents. 30 years. 4 offices. 8 languages spoken daily. That’s SOFTEL today, and most of what makes it work never shows up on LinkedIn.
Founded three decades ago, we’ve grown into a global team of contact-center experts across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. Different cities, different time zones, different languages and local customs, but one shared craft: making sure every customer conversation lands the way it should, anywhere in the world.
The people behind that work rarely get the spotlight. We want to change that.
SOFTEL Communications Inc. Behind the Scenes, our weekly series introducing the global experts who keep contact centers running seamlessly, continues to put our international team under the spotlight. Since July, you have been meeting a different SOFTEL colleague, understanding what problem they solve, what they’ve learned from working in their region, and what most outsiders get wrong about modern contact centers.
This week, we take a break for a croissant and coffee in beautiful Paris and get to know Ali Al Massry, our Senior Solutions Consultant.
Let’s hear about his work and the major projects he’s completed, straight from him.
Interview with Ali
- Ali, you’re our Senior Solutions Consultant. What does that mean, and what does the role actually involve?
Ali: At SOFTEL, being a Senior Solutions Consultant means sitting at the intersection of what a client needs and what our technology can actually deliver. I’ve spent over eleven years in presales and customer experience design, and the role is really about translation; understanding a client’s business problem, then designing a CX or CCaaS solution that solves it, not just technically, but in a way their teams will actually adopt.
Day to day, that means everything from discovery calls with a client’s operations team, to building out solution architecture, to presenting a business case to their executive leadership. I’m usually the person in the room who has to make a complex technical solution make sense to whoever’s writing the check, and just as importantly, make sure it will actually work for the agents using it every day.
- As a Solutions Consultant, you’re often the first point of contact shaping a client’s strategy. How do you design solutions that meet a client’s current needs while anticipating what they’ll need next, especially with AI, governance guardrails, and their existing software already in the mix?
Ali: The honest answer is that anticipating needs starts with listening harder than most people do in a sales process. I try to understand not just what a client is asking for, but what’s driving the ask, a compliance requirement, a customer complaint pattern, or a cost pressure from leadership. That’s usually where the real, unstated need is hiding.
On AI specifically, I never propose it as a feature; I propose it as a capability with boundaries. Clients are, rightly, cautious about AI touching customer conversations without guardrails, so part of my job is designing the governance alongside the technology: what AI is allowed to do autonomously, what it escalates to a human, how it integrates with the systems they already run. A solution that ignores their existing tech stack isn’t a solution; it’s a migration project in disguise.
The clients who trust us long-term are the ones where we got that balance right early and ambitious enough to solve tomorrow’s problem, grounded enough not to break what’s already working.
- SOFTEL is one of the few CX companies with an AI certification, and you were behind the process. Can you tell us more about how it went?
Ali: That was one of the more demanding projects of my time here, and one of the most rewarding. Getting a formal AI certification isn’t a paperwork exercise; it means documenting exactly how AI is used across our solutions, proving the guardrails actually hold up under scrutiny, and showing that governance isn’t just a slide in a sales deck.
The hardest part wasn’t the technology; it was translating what our technical teams knew into something a certifying body, and eventually our clients, could evaluate with confidence. That’s very much in my wheelhouse: I spend my career bridging technical depth and executive-level communication, and this was that skill applied at a company scale.
What it means for clients now is real reassurance: when we propose an AI-enabled solution, we’re not asking them to take our word for it. We can point to an independent certification that says the guardrails are real.
- What’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in how clients think about their contact centers?
Ali: Clients used to come to us purely to cut the cost per call. Now the best conversations start with a completely different question: what is this contact center telling us about our customers that we’re not hearing anywhere else in the business?
That is why contact centers are no longer just cost centers. They are strategic listening posts, especially when supported by governed AI, strong integrations, and industry-specific workflows.
- How do you make sure a solution stays clear and compelling for both the technical team implementing it and the executives approving it?
Ali: I’ve learned to build two versions of every story: the architecture and the outcome. Technical teams want to know how the pieces fit together and where the risk sits. Executives want to know what changes for their customers and their bottom line, and they want to know it in about three sentences.
My rule is that if I can’t explain the value of a solution in a sentence that an executive would repeat in their own meeting, I haven’t finished designing it yet. Getting that right is what actually gets ambitious CX projects funded and, more importantly, adopted once they’re live.
