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 :-)

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