Vijaya Vardhan Panthagani

PowerSchool

Senior Director - Technical Support

Technical Support Site Leader for a 200+ team of technical support staff. Direct span of 3 senior managers and 2 Associate Directors. Indirect span of 15 managers. 

Accountable for technical support delivery, quality and customer experience for NA, EMEA and APAC regions from Bangalore site. Responsible for developing and growing India COE in partnership with India Site Leadership Team.

Director - Technical Support

SaaS Labs

As the head of our global customer support operation, I oversee a team of 40 engineers, 3 team leaders, and 2 managers responsible for customer support across the globe.

EFFICIENCY: 
• Implemented automated conversation snoozing, resulting in a 30% reduction in first response time and a 40% improvement in subsequent response times.
• Introduced response automation through an AI bot (FIN), with AI participating in 30% of chat conversations and achieving a 20% answer resolution rate.
• Streamlined our training plan, reducing the go-live time by 50% through live training sessions and a phased approach to handling initial customer chats.

SERVICE GROWTH:
• Introduced 4 support offerings aligned with our pricing packages, spanning both chat and email channels
• Implemented weekend US shift support for 10 DLC returning and new customers, as well as our priority customers.

SERVICE ENHANCEMENT:
• Significantly improved the refund and cancellation flow, resulting in a more than 50% reduction in refund approval time.
• Enhanced the SDR process, achieving a 30% reduction in response times for 70% of our lead volume.
• Improved help articles, leading to a 23% case deflection and a subsequent improvement in support capacity.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE:
• Expedited customer issue, feature, and bug prioritization by 30% through a monthly Voice of Customer (VOC) report shared with the global leadership team.
• Developed and executed a Customer Support and Customer Success handoff process, leading to a 30% improvement in ticket response times and positively impacting customer retention.

PEOPLE GROWTH:
• Implemented a consistent performance and promotion criteria in partnership with the HR team, mitigating the perception of unfairness and appropriately rewarding top performers.
• Invested in technical upskilling of L1 engineers and cultivated a 6-member L2 team through a dedicated technical trainer and a 3-member lean QA team.

Director - Customer Support

Atlassian

Responsible for technical support delivery, escalation management, customer experience for our Select and Priority customers. Operations and people growth for a 14 member team of senior technical support engineers supporting our Confluence suite of products.  

Over the last 2 years, while being 100% remote,

•	Built trust with my team through regular team bonding, right feedback, removing roadblocks and being an enabler.

•	Drove team success in technical specialization moving the needle from 10% to 70% while onboarding 5 new hires in the last 2 quarters

•	Stabilized the Confluence Select team across 
  - Customer orientation (improved NPS & CSAT by 27%)
	- Internal process/tools adoption (improved by 36%)

•	Leading the hiring effort for FY22 (Jul - Jun 2022) and achieved 100% senior engineer hire calls over the last 3 quarters 
 - Enabled trust and collaboration between a 6 member Talent Acquisition team, 9 peers, 4 senior management execs and 20+ senior tech interviewers  across BLR and Amsterdam
 - Defined strategy and execution. Solved for volume forecast, operational code red situation and a sub-optimal candidate pipeline

•	Leading the weekend staffing planning and execution for EMEA region during FY21 AND FY22
 - Enabled trust and collaboration between 30 senior support engineers, 4 peers and 2 senior management execs across BLR and Amsterdam
 - Defined strategy and execution. Solved for for volume forecast, regional holidays, technology upskilling and weekend compensation policies across BLR and Amsterdam.

Enterprise Support Manager

Citrix

Responsible for technical support delivery, critical escalation management and customer experience for our Priority and Priority Plus customer program. Operations and people management of a 15 member team of senior technical specialists supporting our Virtual Apps Desktops and Citrix Cloud suite of products. 

Actively engaged in support improvement programs with global stakeholders (TRMs, Account managers and Customer Success Managers) to improve our priority customer experience:

•	Reduced Average speed of answer on the call queues by 60%
•	Cross-skilled 80% of the engineers on 70% of VAD products and 100% of Cloud technologies
•	Expanded the team by 25% to accommodate the tech support for growing priority customer base @ 20% Q-on-Q
•	Executed a Rewards & Recognition program to improve priority engineer experience and retention

Senior Manager, Priority Support Program - Virtual Apps and Desktops

Responsible for technical support delivery, escalation management and people management of a 15 member senior technical specialist team for our Virtual Apps and Desktops products.  Maintained a superior customer experience with an NPS >=75.

Technical Support Manager III

Responsible for technical support delivery, operations and people management  of an 18 member team of technical experts supporting the XenServer suite of products at Citrix. Additionally, I spearheaded the below initiatives as part of my role:

•	Net Promoter Score improvement initiative which resulted in NPS moving up from 60 to 65 within 6 months.
•	Advanced Customer handling skills interventions that reduced voice-based customer escalations by 40%

Technical Support Manager II (XenServer)

Talisma

Transforming Customer Experience to over 300 Higher Education Enterprise Customers globally, in the current role as off-shore program manager of a cost center. Leadership role in scaling up release management program to 24x7. Revenue generated from the off-shore cost center - US $ 200,000 per year. Additionally, built and managing a 24x7 technical support team, to cater to Middle East and Africa geographies.

Senior Technical Support Manager - Release Management

In this role, I managed release management delivery to 300 premier US customers across all US timezones with a team of 12 technical experts.I developed skill-gap analysis for all resources and charted a proactive technical training program in-line with new technologies in the future product versions – reduced customer escalations by 50% post new product version releases.

Technical Support Manager - Release Management

In this program, I managed a profit center having 16 premium customers having one technical Talisma on-site support consultant/expert onsite, per customer, pan India.  All the remote on-site support experts were full -time employees of Talisma reporting to me. The size of the business was INR 2 crores per year. I was responsible for customer contract renewal, annually. I also managed AMC renewals of Bangalore region customers having standard support contracts, as an additional responsibility. Achieved 100% AMC renewals. Used innovative cost savings techniques to achieve 50% profit margin.

Technical Support Manager - Expert Services

Managing Customer Experience to over 100 Talisma CRM Customers in APAC & Europe region. Responsible for 24x7 product support delivery with a team of 15 technical support experts.Additionally, planned and managed delivery of two Talisma CRM upgrade projects & one server migration project with existing resources. Overall, revenue to company was INR 10 lakhs.

Technical Support Manager - Product Support

I was the Technical Escalation SPOC for a profit center (Expert Services) having around 16 premium customers across India. Quarterly travel to customer locations to review resource/system performance with customer IT/BU heads.I also assisted with finalizing Expert Services annual support contracts for existing and new customers. Additionally, I anticipated and converted a customer’s reporting business requirement into an SOW worth USD $ 10,000 and managed delivery with an existing resource – zero additional cost to company.

Technical Lead - Expert Services

Managed a USD $30,000 SQL Server reporting services project for a marquee customer of Campus Management - Career Ed Corporation, Chicago, IL. I traveled to customer location in US for requirement gathering and project planning for 4 weeks. In a short period of 2 weeks, I formed and trained a 3 member off-shore team (including myself) to meet customer's business requirements.

Technical Lead - Reporting Services

I led a team of support escalation engineers to provide solutions for high priority product bugs and Support escalations via the Sustain Engineering Program. I influenced customer oriented decisions by liaising between Support and Development as a customer advocate.

Technical Lead - Sustain Engineering

I provided Premier Application Support and was SPOC (Single Point of Contact) for Talisma CRM implementation at Microsoft. I managed a complex Talisma application installation of 10 database servers (SQL cluster), 6 IIS servers (cluster), 4 Application servers (cluster) and 20 Windows 2003 terminal servers. Provided technical mentoring and process-orientation for a team of 5 support engineers based out of Bangalore, India.

Senior Technical Support Engineer

My job was to troubleshoot and resolve Talisma product technical support cases and ensuring high customer satisfaction rates. I also did process-orientation and technical mentoring for L1 support engineers.

Technical Support Engineer

My job was to write and execute test cases for the assigned modules in the Talisma product. I was the Feature Owner for Talisma CRM Sales Module and Offline Client. I researched on the Higher Education vertical and submitted a case study on implementing Talisma CRM in a University based setup.

Software Test Engineer

National Informatics Center

This was my first internship-cum-job straight out of college. First experience with a real time programming language and databases. Developed & supported a module in VB 6.0 and Oracle 8i as part of the Land Records Management Information System maintained by the Govt of AP. The cool thing about this project was I used language API's to be able to show the front end UI for my module in TELUGU (local language).

Software Engineer

I help managers demolish self doubt, get clarity and become promotable | Transformational Leadership Coach | Technical Support Leader

Over the last 20 years, I've built and scaled technical support teams ranging from 10 to 200+ staff across both Fortune 500 companies and startups. My speciality lies in setting vision and following it up with ruthless execution to achieve people and business outcomes. I prioritize progress over perfection and problem solving over innovation. I believe perfection and innovation are achieved through relentless focus on moving forward.

Director of Customer Support

Busy building the best customer service team on the planet. Hit me up if you are passionate about elevating customer experience through employee experience. I promise you won't regret the time spent :-)

Kevin Levine

Customer Success Focus

Boutique customer success consultancy focused on client experience, recurring revenue retention, expansion, and profitability.

BairesDev® - Senior Customer Success Advisor

A nearshore partner for software development. Bairesdev understands before starting your tailored solution whether you need a dedicated team, to outsource projects, or leverage staff augmentation. BairesDev has collaborated with startups, SMBs, Fortune Global 500 companies, and industry leaders across the world. Their clients include Google, J&J, and Rolls Royce. They employ over 4,000 rigorously vetted bilingual software professionals from the Americas and the Caribbean who represent the top 1% of talent across 50 countries. Hundreds of satisfied clients are enjoying on-budget and on-time project delivery. Transform your biggest business and tech challenges into value-driven outcomes and lasting partnerships today.

ZapScale - Customer Success Marketing Content Developer & Customer Success Platform Consultant

ZapScale is the easiest Customer Success Platform for B2B SaaS companies to reduce churn, improve retention and increase upsells.
ZapScale is the only Customer Success platform that provides:
★ Comprehensive customer health scoring with 40 pre-built KPIs to track customer health  
★ 50 pre-built automated playbooks to run
★ Zero-code customer outcome tracking with a DIY on-screen outcome mapping tool
★ Quick 1-day up-and-running experience

J Stalick Consultancy Services · Member of the Board of Advisors

Kin-Keepers - Senior Customer Success Leader & Program Manager

★ Positioned and managed several Artificial Intelligence (AI) dementia and elder care SaaS related offerings into a customer success full lifecycle management experience.

★ Developed, trained team, and executed customer success management and leadership practices and principles to attain a 98% renewal rate and 115% net recurring revenue.

Customer Success Principal Consultant

VMware

★ Played a critical leadership role in creating and implementing a transformational global customer success program to solve persistent issues of low adoption and consumption at a $13B global provider of cloud computing and virtualization services. 

★ Developed and executed a long-term strategic roadmap, project plan, and minimal viable program definition for a customer success transformation effort to provide customer success coverage to $11B (85% of total) of annual recurring business. 

★ Championed the implementation of a new Software as a Service (SaaS) and subscription customer success program aimed to empower partners to effectively solve client problems across the customer lifecycle while delivering a superior experience. 

★ Defined and established a partner-led customer success program roadmap with a 3-phased implementation plan based on insights and feedback gathered through extensive consultation with leadership, internal teams, industry leaders, and channel partners.

★ Created and delivered roadmap elements, including a customer success capability maturity model, training and certification pathways, program & operational playbook guides, usage & adoption dashboards, post-sale success plan, and workshops.

★ Developed a best-in-class customer success enablement and operations framework comprised of customer success onboarding and team improvement programs that seamlessly integrated into VMware’s S360 support and service offering.

★ Leveraged Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Voice of the Customer (VOC) data to improve enterprise software product offerings, digital marketing, and program effectiveness to drive partner success strategy and execution. 

★ Led the integration of customer success principles and methodologies across all aspects of customer success influence, including organizationally, expansion sales, crisis preparedness, persona relations, extreme ownership, and change management.

Senior Program Manager, Partner Success GTM Activation

Established and developed a customer success consulting firm providing specialized expertise and insights on customer success strategy, programs, processes, and strategic partnerships to various small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Atomic Daycare

★ Consulted through a customer success lens on product development, go-to-market, and funding for an open-source, SaaS Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based agriculture technology start-up with the goal of delivering a perfect grow through data analysis.

Kin-Keepers

★ Drove customer success implementation strategy and customer lifecycle management processes while accelerating client acquisition and strengthening partnerships for a SaaS AI/ML solution that translates dementia patient utterances into intelligible communication.

★ Created, implemented, and executed customer adoption and sale expansion strategies for the company’s web-based solutions while leading trademarking and copywrite efforts to protect the brand and secured federal/state grants to facilitate business expansion.

QVALON

★ Provided strategic direction, operational leadership, and data analysis mapped to client business outcomes to improve sales, marketing, and customer success capabilities for a successful international retail SaaS company seeking to enter the US market.

Respana

★ Designed, managed programs, implemented sales, marketing, and customer success strategies, processes, and metrics to deliver a simplified, repeatable, and efficient sales and lifecycle journey for a client data actionable insights and analytics organization.

Pivot3

★ Transformed onboarding through redesign of client product trainings and enablement activities for enterprise cloud-based solutions requiring time-sensitive workloads. Increased adoption by 12% while reducing time-to-value from 30 to 17 days and support impact.

★ Served in multiple customer support leadership facets developing and establishing social media, knowledge management, escalations, and support planning and management capabilities for a start-up collaborative partnership between EMC, VMware, and Cisco.

★ Progressed to roles with increasing responsibilities, beginning as the first escalation team hire, then advanced to run both knowledge management and social & communication departments while actively assisting the support planning and management team.

Success Enablement & Serviceability

★ Spearheaded the creation and implementation of VCE’s multichannel customer success social media strategy driving efficient and transparent communication of internal news to customers while reporting to leadership on KPIs and monitoring for derogatory issues.

Success Engagement Social Media

★ Built the company’s knowledge base enablement program consisting of processes, procedures, best practices, and tools from scratch to increase client retention and renewals while reviewing, approving, and driving program adoption to over 2000 articles. 

★ Partnered with the DevOps team to build monthly customer success KPI reporting capabilities in Salesforce.com to highlight customer trends/insights and provide strategic recommendations to influence executive decision-making.

Head of Knowledge Management

★ Designed and implemented robust on-site/remote technical escalations management and customer advocacy capabilities to ensure delivery of high-touch customer service and escalations support, resulting in an exceptional white-glove customer experience.

Customer Advocacy & Escalations

Hitachi Data Systems (BlueArc Corporation)

BlueArc, now part of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), offers cloud data solutions for Software as a Service product offerings and on-premise software solutions.

Technical Product Support, Services, and Account Management

Agami Systems

Technical Product Support, Services, and Account Manager

HPE Continuity

Technical Marketing Specialist and Senior Success Enablement Consultant

NetApp

Technical Product Support Services Specialist 

Lucent Technologies (Ascend Communications)

Product Quality Engineer

Broadcom Software

Technical Support Professional

In a career of over 12 years as a global customer success strategist, change agent, and consultant, I have acquired extensive experience in driving transformational customer success strategies, programs, and partnerships to expand customer success coverage, optimize customer lifecycle management, and maximize cross-sell, upsell and expansion sale moments within the customer journey. Some of the initiatives that I have driven include transformation of customer success models, deployment of innovative customer success enablement tools and resources, process improvement and automation, operational playbook development, team training, and customer experience KPI and dashboard design. I also excel in advising and supporting C-level leadership across the entire project life cycle for such customer success transformation initiatives, and in crafting customer success-aligned sales processes, go-to-market plans, and account-based marketing strategies. 

Career Highlights:

★ Drove the development and implementation of a partner-led customer success program at VMware that leveraged the company’s 28K+ worldwide channel partners to protect $11B in annual B2B revenue from churn while maximizing renewals and client retention.

o	Rolled out cross-functional customer success program, including enablement tools and resources, comprehensive customer success plan, insight reporting dashboards, certifications, and incentive program geared to client business outcome attainment. 

o	Generated a 12% increase in Net Recurring Revenue (NRR) by leading a customer success change management initiative that took channel partners from a one-time purchase model to a recurring subscription-based SaaS model.

★ Spearheaded the design and implementation of a customer success-aligned sales process and account-based marketing strategies to help an overseas SaaS firm (QVALON) enter the US market, resulting in 2K+ warm leads.  

★ Built customer success strategies, programs, processes, and technology infrastructure from the ground up for VCE (a cloud start-up partnership between EMC, VMware, and Cisco), leading to $1B in revenue in just 2 years, along with 98% customer satisfaction.

Senior Program Manager, Partner Success

Designed, launched, implemented, and managed a new innovative partner led customer success program focused on full lifecycle customer journey enablement, operations, and strategy to ensure VMware partners have an efficient and effective customer success practice.

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Vijaya Vardhan Panthagani

Kevin Levine

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