We were lucky enough to sit down with Dutta Satadip ahead of the Chief Customer Officer USA event he will be speaking at in January. He gave us some key insight into his career, strategies for achieving business goals and the importance of regularly building on your skills.

1. Tell us a bit about your background and how you ended up in your current role

I currently head up the Customer Success organization for the Americas region at Google. I am responsible for comprehensively driving customer retention, achieving sales targets, and scaling operations across a multi-billion dollar portfolio of over 150 products with teams in 15 different offices. My industry experience has grown over the past 20 years and I have held various senior leadership roles in most key operating areas, including Pre-Sales, Business Operations, Product Strategy, Product Management, Product Marketing, Engineering as well as Consulting positions. I specialize in transforming organizations by identifying the right strategic levers to drive the business while minimizing risk.

My background has seen me operate extensively in both developed and emerging countries. My work has been with both startups and large corporations scaling businesses by driving customer engagement, identifying key product improvements and building strategic, revenue-oriented partnerships. I have also developed innovative market solutions for a variety of enterprise customers and consumers.

I am a frequent speaker at major conferences including TEDx on management topics such as Change Management, Leadership and building diverse teams.

2. What is the biggest challenge you face within your role today and how are you looking to tackle it?

The biggest challenge is attracting the right talent to customer centric roles. In the past the profile of someone in a customer centric organization would be someone who has good communication skills and the ability to deeply understand products. The real value now comes from skills around automation and analysis. Attracting people with great technical/engineering skills or data science and analysis skills that also want to be in customer centric roles is challenging. Roles in product development are more attractive and considered prestigious and they tend to be the first preference for these skills.

3. In what ways are you working with your business to help drive value and insights driven decision making? And in which business area, function or metric, has your team made the biggest impact?

One of the big challenges in customer centric functions is that it is easy to see them as cost-centers and a place to reduce costs. While reducing costs can be easily accomplished through diligent use of automation and outsourcing – there is a bigger opportunity – how do we enable top line growth, how we do enable customer retention/reduce churn and how do we improve customer lifetime value.

We have been focussing a lot of understand correlation between actions that drive retention/renewals as the first step. This allows us to apply data centric insights along with an understanding of our customer’s business needs and customer ability to adopt/absorb changes. We have been able to impact metrics around product adoption and have shown how higher product adoption leads to continued /increased investments in our products.

4. In what ways have you notice a fundamental shift towards a more customer focused culture within your organization?

As more and more business become subscription based, the value of customer retention becomes more important to the business. As per HBR - acquiring a new customer may be 5 to 25 times more expensive than to retain an existing customer. As customer retention has a direct impact on the a business bottom line – it has led to an increased focus.

5. What strategies do you employ for keeping current in a technological environment which is rapidly changing and developing. How do you determine what technology to invest in, and how can you stay current without tonnes of investment?

One of the key principles, I like to really think about is what is the core business problem that needs to be solved. Before, I personally think about technologies, I look at the problem and attempt to understand
- What are clear business metrics that will need to be impacted
- What are the business process that need to change as a result
- How will the organization and people absorb the changes

Once, we have better understanding of the three dimensions, we look at how we can apply technologies and tools to solve this problem. Have a clearer understanding of the end result outcome allows us to have a better understanding of the business evaluation criteria to understand which technology to invest in.

One of the scenarios that we often wanted to evaluate was machine learning. We often found out that for a wide variety of problems, we had an idea about the business results but when it came to processes, we did not have clear data sets or ways to annotate the data sets. This allowed us to stop investments in certain projects early on as we figured out that our data sets were not robust enough to get the benefits of machine learning.

6. When it comes to recruitment, what approach do you take to attract and keep the best talent? What do you feel they value? And in what ways do you partner with outside entities such as academia to help you in this endeavour?

We have several university recruitment and outreach programs. Our biggest focus now is to help our team members acquire newer skill sets. We have become more explicit in our overall communication and expectations on skills that matter. As an example, we have self serve course on SQL/R and we encourage managers to actively recommend these courses as a part of on going career conversations.

We also encourage team members to leverage courses from Coursera/Udacity to start to build foundations with Python and other languages to help build skills around automation.

Author:

Dutta Satadip, Director, Customer Success - Americas, Google