Goodry Gubbels

Six threads, three decades

Rather than walking through thirty years one job title at a time, it feels more natural to organise this page around the themes that have stayed with me throughout my career. Some appeared early and never really went away; others emerged unexpectedly and became defining parts of the journey.

1. 1997 – today

   Building teams, and the delivery around them

   Looking back, the common thread has never really been technology. It's been people. The most elegant system in the world won't achieve much without the right team, the right culture, and the right support around it.

   That lesson first took shape at an early European ISP, back when the internet still needed explaining and most of us were figuring things out as we went along.

   • Grew a customer care department from 5 to more than 30 people within two and a half years, before successfully transitioning it into a multi-level outsourced helpdesk operation.
   • Led multicultural and multidisciplinary teams of up to 180 people across ICT, service delivery, and operations.
   • Recruited, trained, and handed over teams in countries where the operation, and sometimes even the office itself, had not existed a year earlier.
2. 1996 – today

   Customer service, and keeping the human in it

   I came into technology through the front line: support engineer, helpdesk supervisor, and later managing client relations for an ISP's Belgian operation. Three decades later, that's still the lens through which I see technology.

   Every platform, process, and organisational chart is ultimately somebody trying to get an answer from somebody else.

   • Held full responsibility for a customer care department at management-committee level, including budget, recruitment, service levels, quality commitments, and its eventual outsourcing.
   • Built one of my first production systems, a web-based e-mail response platform, because the volume of customer conversations had outgrown the available tools, as far back as 1996.
   • Selected and deployed CRM solutions internally and at outsourcing partners to create a consistent view of the customer experience.
   • Introduced automated customer satisfaction and NPS measurements at scale, providing real-time visibility into service quality.
   • Learned an important lesson about automation: it only deserves a place if the customer experience is genuinely improved. Sometimes efficiency matters; sometimes the conversation itself is the service.
3. 2000 – 2006

   Offshore and near-shore operations

   When organisations expand faster than their delivery capacity, sometimes the answer is not a project but an entirely new operation.

   In Tunisia and later across Eastern Europe, that meant helping create facilities, infrastructure, support structures, and teams from the ground up. The work involved much more than technology alone: buildings, telecommunications, utilities, suppliers, local regulations, and above all the people who would eventually run the operation.

   • Delivered an offshore contact-centre operation in Tunis, bringing a delayed programme back under control while maintaining its original budget.
   • Coordinated the technical delivery of facilities, international telecommunications, utilities, and equipment.
   • Extended the same operational model into near-shore locations across Eastern Europe.
   • Integrated new sites into existing operational standards rather than allowing them to evolve as isolated islands.
4. 2006 – 2014

   Self-service, speech technology & automation

   One of the projects I'm still particularly proud of was building a large-scale speech-driven self-service platform, “TPi”.

   What started as an idea gradually became a working reality: I developed the concept, designed the technical architecture, and for many years was the person writing the code that brought it all together. Built on technologies such as Genesys, Nuance, and .NET, it eventually supported multiple client activities on a shared platform.

   • Scaled to approximately 8 million customer interactions per month across voice, web, chat, and e-mail.
   • Created MASC, an automated speech-enabled satisfaction and NPS measurement platform handling up to 2.5 million surveys each month.
   • Worked with speech recognition, semantic analysis, text-to-speech, and some of the artificial intelligence techniques and tools available at the time, years before any of it was commonly described as AI.

   What fascinated me most was never the technology itself. It was the challenge of making complex systems feel natural and useful for the people using them.

5. 2000 – today

   Infrastructure consolidation & the digital workplace

   A recurring theme throughout my career has been bringing order to complex environments. Whether through consolidation, standardisation, cloud adoption, or new ways of working, the goal has usually been the same: make systems easier to support, easier to measure, and easier for people to use.

   • Harmonised business-critical ICT across 20 countries, 28 subsidiaries, and more than 65 operational sites.
   • Designed and delivered remote-working platforms that expanded far beyond their original scope while remaining on schedule and under budget.
   • Consolidated multiple CRM systems onto a single platform, significantly improving availability, consistency, and reliability.

   Much of this work was invisible to end users, which is often how infrastructure should be. When it works well, people barely notice it's there.

6. 2000 – 2006

   Governance, auditing & cost management

   Governance rarely makes headlines, but it is often the difference between good intentions and consistent delivery.

   Much of this work involved creating standards, benchmarks, reporting structures, and practical ways for international teams to work towards common goals without losing the flexibility needed to support local business requirements.

   • Founded and chaired an international ICT steering committee covering operations across Europe.
   • Renegotiated major international supplier agreements, significantly reducing ongoing operational costs.
   • Introduced benchmarking, auditing, and compliance programmes that improved consistency across a large and geographically diverse environment.
   • Applied frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT, and ISO 9001 not as objectives in themselves, but as tools to support better service delivery.