With the Future of SaaS Festival around the corner, we wanted to take the opportunity to introduce a few of our speakers, to give you a pre-event insight into their presentations.
This week we’d like you to meet Vish Walia, Senior Customer Success Manager, Business Applications & Power Platform Solutions at Microsoft.
Vish will be outlining how to future-ready your business in the new normal 2.0, but first, he took the time to answer some questions about his upcoming presentation, how the past year has forced him to adapt his day-to-day, plus his favorite thing about working in Customer Success.
Q: Hi Vish, welcome to Future of SaaS! First off, can you please provide us with a few details about your festival talk?
A: First of all, thanks to Future of SaaS for providing an amazing opportunity to present my talk. My festival talk is called ‘Future-ready your business in Normal 2.0’. Since last year, I have helped several companies in re-strategizing and moving their business forward. As a result, I developed a future-ready business framework that I will share in my presentation, this will help companies reimagine their business, redesign their business processes and recharge their employees.
Q: Can you give us a sneak peek of one of the tactics you outline in your talk?
A: Millions of companies are struggling with an unprecedented challenge – how to deal with the emerging threats and uncertainties. In my talk, I will emphasize the emergent strategies that are developed to address strategic uncertainties, unplanned threats, and evolving opportunities. I’ll share a proven mechanism to build emergent strategies for organizations.
Q: In your talk, you discuss empowering employees with the right technology, what are some of your favorite tools for tracking metrics?
A: Future-ready companies will empower employees with the right technology to succeed in their jobs. Business programs equipped with AI and machine learning will help employees to automate their work processes including scheduling meetings, info on customers’ usage trends, and identify the next best solutions, etc. My favorite tools include Dynamics 365 CRM, MS Teams, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to streamline my work.
Q: How has the past year forced you to adapt your day-to-day?
A: I’ve adapted to the agile work model. Rather than focusing on time-consuming, big initiatives I focus on high impact, optimum effort top priority initiatives daily. I start my day by defining the top 3-4 top priorities including my customers’ top priority, developing an execution plan, and delivering results.
Q: What’s your number one customer success tip?
A: Customer intimacy is my #1 tip. Try to know your customer better than anyone else and provide amazing customer experiences with significant outcomes.
Q: For anyone considering a career in Customer Success, what advice would you give them?
A: One piece of advice to aspiring CS professionals is to place your customer at the center and do what is best for them. If you embrace this operating principle then you are not only making your customer successful but your company successful. Because your customer’s success drives your company’s success!
Q: What’s your favorite thing about working in Customer Success?
A: My favorite thing about customer success is its multifaceted role; it offers an amazing opportunity to help customers in success planning, ensuring projects are deployed advantageously, boosting user adoption, and overall, ensuring customers achieve their desired business outcomes.
