Meet: Karthik Lakshmanan Prakash
Karthik has been with NODE since 2021 and works as a Team Leader for the Customer Success Chapter. His passion for enhancing customer experiences led him to focus on Customer Success, where he now leads a team dedicated to ensuring long-term customer satisfaction and value.
During our NODE T-Talk, we discussed Karthik's inspirations for pursuing a career in Customer Success and how his educational background influenced his path. He shared insights into his team's core responsibilities, strategies for improving customer engagement, and how they balance strategic planning with day-to-day operations.
Hi Karthik, tell us a little about yourself. What inspired you to pursue a career in Customer Success, and how has your educational background influenced you?
As a working student, I was introduced to Mobile robots while doing my master’s in Automation and robotics at TU Dortmund from 2018 to 2020. Right after my education, I started with NODE in 2021 as an application engineer, where I’ve had the chance to engage with diverse customers and understand their unique needs. The thrill of integrating mobile robots and preparing them for real-world applications in various industries was incredibly rewarding. As I interacted with customers and witnessed the positive impact of our solutions on their operations, I realized the critical role Customer Success plays in ensuring long-term satisfaction and value. This realization has inspired me to focus my career in this direction.
As the Chapter Lead in Customer Success, what are the core responsibilities of your team, and how do you support their success?
My team is tasked with integrating our navigation software onto customer robots and providing long-term support to ensure an exceptional experience for the customers. We prioritize close relationships with our customers, allowing us to address their specific challenges effectively. I am fortunate to work with a team of highly motivated and skilled engineers. As a Chapter lead, one of my primary responsibilities is to provide the necessary support and infrastructure that enables my team members to perform at their best. This includes facilitating professional development, fostering collaboration, and ensuring we have the resources needed to succeed.
What does a typical day look like for you as a Chapter Lead? How do you balance strategic thinking with day-to-day operations?
As a Chapter Lead, it’s challenging to define a “typical” day, since it often depends on incoming customer requests. However, my day generally includes working on open issues for various customers and participating in regular meetings to discuss their current experiences with the software. These meetings provide an opportunity to follow up on open topics and gather feedback on resolved issues. In addition to managing day-to-day operations, I focus on strategic planning. I work with my team to identify key areas for improvement in our support processes, setting priorities for the upcoming weeks. This balance between addressing immediate customer needs and planning for long-term enhancements is crucial for driving success in our Customer Success efforts.
Can you share any strategies or practices that have been particularly effective in improving customer engagement and satisfaction?
Our team has implemented a key account strategy where each customer is assigned to a specific team member as their primary contact, while another member serves as a proxy. This arrangement ensures that customers have a consistent point of contact, and the proxy can step in whenever the primary account manager is unavailable. This approach fosters sustainable engagement and helps us build strong relationships with our customers. Moreover, for our long-term support customers, we utilize a sprint-based approach. This involves collaborating with customers to prioritize their open topics and then working towards resolving them within two-week sprints. This method helps us stay focused and achieve our goals efficiently, ensuring that we address the customers' needs on time.
How do you manage customer expectations when their needs are not immediately feasible within the current software capabilities?
We manage customer requests through our service desk ticketing system, which allows customers to create mainly three types of tickets: Bug, Support, and Feature Request. When a customer has a use case or expectation that our software currently doesn't support, we categorize it as a “Feature Request” ticket. We then internally evaluate the request to determine if it aligns with our product roadmap. If it does, we include it in our development plans, establish a delivery date, and communicate this to the customer. We prioritize transparency by regularly updating customers on the progress of development, ensuring they are informed about any advancements related to their requests.
How do you collaborate with other teams, such as development or product, to ensure that customer feedback is seamlessly integrated into our software updates?
As a Customer Success Lead, one of my key responsibilities is to serve as a bridge between our customers and internal teams. Customer feedback is invaluable, and our Customer Success team actively collects and communicates this feedback to both the development and product management teams. We hold frequent review sessions with these teams to effectively discuss customer insights and explore how to integrate them into the development workflow or product roadmap. By doing so, we ensure that our software evolves to meet current industry use cases and effectively address customer needs, ultimately enhancing the product and delivering a better experience for our users.
Can you highlight a project or initiative that you and your team have recently worked on to enhance the customer experience?
One significant initiative our team recently undertook to enhance the customer experience was addressing concerns about the quality of our release updates. We implemented a Quality Assurance (QA) gateway for these updates, ensuring that all releases are safe and highly reliable. This initiative allows our customers to upgrade to the latest version of our software, enabling them to take full advantage of the new features we’ve developed and integrated easily and swiftly into our software stack.
What role does customer feedback play in your decision-making process for implementing changes or new features?
Customer feedback is essential to our decision-making process for implementing changes or new features. We actively solicit input from our customers to understand their needs and challenges better. This feedback helps us identify common pain points and valuable opportunities for improvement. By analyzing trends and prioritizing requests based on their frequency and impact, we can make informed decisions that align our development efforts with what our users truly want. This ensures that the enhancements we implement not only meet customer expectations but also drive greater satisfaction and engagement with our product.
Where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth in Customer Success at NODE over the coming years?
With the growth of our customer base, there are exciting yet challenging opportunities ahead for our Customer Success team at NODE. We mainly aim to enhance customer self-sufficiency by providing extensive documentation and simplifying the product for ease of use, even for those without deep expertise. Additionally, there’s significant potential to automate our ticketing workflow, allowing us to address support requests more efficiently and quickly.
How do you stay motivated and continue to grow in your role, both personally and professionally?
What excites me most about being part of the Customer Success team is the variety of challenges I face each day; no two days are the same. Being the face of the company for our customers adds an extra layer of significance to my role. Over the past year, I've gained valuable insights into the market potential of mobile robotics while navigating various customer situations. This experience has helped me become more empathetic and patient. As a Customer Success lead, balancing my responsibilities in leading the team and managing my key accounts provides me with continuous learning opportunities. Every day at NODE enhances my technical expertise as well as my managerial and communication skills.
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The interview was led by Nadine Trommeshauser.
