Employee Spotlight: Q&A with Preeti Krishnan, Senior Director of Customer Experience, at Nasuni

Nasuni caught up with Preeti Krishnan, Senior Director of Customer Experience, to talk about her journey within the company and what drives her day-to-day.

Preeti has enjoyed an immensely varied and successful career, working with everyone from international corporations to early-stage startups, before bringing her expertise to Nasuni seven years ago. She was instrumental in establishing many of Nasuni’s customer experience initiatives and today heads up the department responsible for retaining and expanding the company’s global customer base.

Q: You’ve worked across such a variety of departments over your career. Can you talk about your move into customer experience?

My first exposure to customer-facing roles was at Dell EMC. I started my career in engineering, before moving to their Global Support & Services division, eventually becoming the Serviceability Product Owner for their midrange product division. Each of these moves across organizations helped me understand the bigger picture and appreciate the business decisions that play such a key role in keeping customers satisfied while ensuring profitability. There is so much more to it than writing good code and having a functional product!

That exposure dramatically shifted my perspective on issues and tolerance for what can and cannot work in the field. I started viewing bugs not merely as technical issues needing a fix or a workaround. I also began considering their impact on our customers and on our support and services staff that maintain our customer base. There is a much broader context that affects decision making, customer satisfaction, and ultimately our business success.

Q: Do you remember what first drew you to Nasuni?

I had moved to a startup after Dell EMC, and when they got acquired, I began looking for my next opportunity. I really enjoy the startup environment — you have a greater opportunity to define your role, and the freedom to wear multiple hats. You also get to start at the ground floor, and while it may require more work upfront, like building some systems from scratch, it can be very rewarding.

A vice president of my previous company had suggested Nasuni and that we’d be a good fit. While Nasuni wasn’t exactly a startup at that point, it was still in a high-growth phase where I felt I could actively contribute and have an impact. I got to meet Paul Flanagan, Nasuni’s then CEO. Meeting Paul was the turning point — his vision and energy were so impressive that I knew this company was going places, and I wanted to be part of what he was building. That sealed the deal for me.

Q: Today, what area of the business is your customer experience department responsible for?

As a SaaS company, our number one focus is to drive customer satisfaction and retention. The key to this is keeping our customers happy.

We touch on all aspects of the customer journey, from onboarding to steady state maintenance right through retention, which is why customer experience is such a big umbrella. Our programs, many of which I have had the opportunity to build from scratch, fall under six distinct workstreams: Net Promoter Index (NPI), customer documentation and training, customer operations, analytics, and customer experience programs focusing on quality, voice of customer, and retention. Any area that affects how customers experience Nasuni is in scope for us, inherently making what we do highly cross-functional.

Q: It sounds like working cross functionally is both baked into customer experience and also a priority of yours. How does your team work cross functionally and how has that brought you success?

The reason our relatively small team can manage such a wide range of responsibilities is that every one of our programs is cross-functional. We partner with people across the company to build and run our initiatives. It’s a smarter way to work, and we get so much more done.

For example, we collaborate with engineering on programs designed to drive quality. We partner with Sales and Account Management on programs focused on customer retention, and with multiple stakeholders on our NPI programs.

Nasuni’s collaborative culture truly sets us apart. Unlike larger organizations where departmental boundaries can limit innovation or collaboration, Nasuni encourages openness and teamwork across functions. This culture has been critical to both my team’s effectiveness and my personal satisfaction here. I love that about Nasuni!

Q: A big part of your work is around collecting and analysing customer feedback. How do you manage that?

An important pillar of our customer experience programs is the “Voice of the Customer” initiative, which involves running Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, and analyzing the data. Lots of companies run these surveys and compute a score without taking further action. But for us at Nasuni, that’s just the starting point. Conducting the surveys is only about 30% of our program. The other 70% is analyzing the data and doing something about it. We dive deeper into understanding exactly what delights or frustrates our customers — and then work to actively implement changes based on those insights. It is this commitment to follow-through that makes us unique, and why our scores continue to improve year after year.

Q: Can you give me some examples of the ways that you then act on that data?

Our actions depend entirely on what customers share with us through their feedback. For instance, if their concerns are product specific, we run product focused plays designed to address their product concerns. This includes dedicated one-on-one sessions with our senior product leaders. The goal isalways to close the feedback loop. We focus on what they’re unhappy about and then work with the respective teams to make customers feel heard, show that we care, and demonstrate our commitment to them.

This commitment to our customers extends to the very top at Nasuni. Our executive suite is completely involved in this follow-through. Customers even get to hear directly from Paul, our CEO. This executive-level engagement demonstrates that at Nasuni, every customer’s voice matters.

Q: Out of all of the programs and initiatives that you’ve worked on, is there one that you’re particularly proud of?

A recent initiative that I am particularly pleased with is the ‘Nasuni Customer 360’. It is a fully automated and individually customized customer value report that I built last year with our Product, Business Applications, and Analytics teams. The automation allows us to send customized reports in real time to each customer, showing the specific value they’re deriving from Nasuni — essentially their “Year in Review” report.

By including custom real-time metrics from our Nasuni Orchestration Center (NOC), the report communicates Nasuni’s unique value story of effortless scale, built-in security, fast-edge performance, and even includes a sustainability component. Overall, Nasuni’s environmental savings impact (something personally very meaningful to me, as we do have our future generations to think about).

Q: Looking forward, what excites you about the future for your department or for the company as a whole?

The opportunity to build for scale! We’re at an inflection point looking to double and triple over the next few years. But this growth presents its own challenges as well (the good kind!). As our customer base grows, there needs to be more focus on efficient processes and automation. A successful company with 5000 customers operates very differently from one with 500 customers. This challenge of setting ourselves up to scale effectively and efficiently, while still maintaining our high-touch approach, excites me.

If you’re interested in being a part of the next phase of our growth, check out the recent career opportunities at Nasuni here.