183. The Surprising Way Microsoft Does Customer Success at Scale ft. Pradeep Raman (Microsoft)

And I think us assisting customers to get deployed makes a ton of sense.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight podcast network, serving as VP of Customer Success. Pradeep Raman is a 27 year veteran at Microsoft overseeing a team that deploys Azure infrastructure for thousands of companies at zero cost to them not to be generous to make sure they actually succeed. When customers commit to Azure, Pradeep’s team gets in the boat with them. Doesn’t get out until the thing customers commit to. It’s a bet on what happens after the sale and doesn’t get out until the things get into. Why Microsoft rebuilt customer success from a sales support it doesn’t shit out until the end of growth. And what most CS leaders still get wrong about the thing shakes. I’m Josh Schachter.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
This is Unchurned about Driving. Subscribe to our substack@ Unchurned.Gainsight.com where we go deep on every episode. Like how one post sales team at Cloudbeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more@ Unchurned.Gainsight dot com

Josh Schachter [Host]:
hey everybody and welcome to this week’s episode of Unchurned. I’m Josh Schachter, senior Vice President of Strategy and go to market development at Gainsight and I am super stoked to be here today with, with Vice President of Customer Success, the Vice president of customer success at Microsoft, Pradeep Rahman. Pradeep, thank you so much for being on the show.

Pradeep Raman:
Thank you, Josh. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, absolutely. So you’ve been with Microsoft just for like a minute or two. You’ve had a cup of tea there. We’re going on like 15 years now. Congratulations.

Pradeep Raman:
Yeah, actually 27. What?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
27.

Pradeep Raman:
Yes, back when my hair was not gray and, and long time. Wow. But yeah, long and winding road. A lot of different roles but still having fun, still enjoying it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Now I want to turn this episode into talking about the history of Microsoft for 27 years since, you know, before the dot com days. That must be. What was your. What was. Tell us about your first job at Microsoft 27 years ago.

Pradeep Raman:
It was. I actually joined the company in consulting in a delivery role. So it was a national consulting practice focused on delivering projects for our, for the big retail customers around the country and definitely, you know, dream job. Kind of one of the best kind of learning experiences. I came from corporate IT roles in the past, hadn’t done consulting before and nothing like kind of being thrown into the deep end and being asked to go to a customer site and give them advice and be the subject matter expert on technology that is still cutting edge and that you are still learning on the plane ride over and all of that stuff. So no, it was. Yeah, it was a great run. I mean, consulting and delivery is something that has been a full circle for me in my career so far and something I’ve always enjoyed.

Pradeep Raman:
So.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Pradeep Raman:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What’s been your most memorable Bill Gates encounter?

Pradeep Raman:
Probably the most memorable one is an award ceremony where I was being recognized for an award and I was actually doing a consulting engagement at the time for Customer Enterprise Customer in Florida. And when I went up to get my picture with Bill, I had a pin of the customer and I asked him to bill, can you please put this on your shirt so I can take it to the CEO of my customer and they’ll really enjoy it. And I think he kind of looked at his security people and was a little concerned about the safety.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
But some tracking device on this pin or something like that. Yeah. Oh, that’s so funny. That’s a Bill Gates type of problem I supposed to have.

Pradeep Raman:
Yes.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay. And then you’ve had multiple roles there. You worked in sales, you worked in technical roles, and now vice president of customer success. What is vice president of customer success at Microsoft? Because it’s probably different than vice president of customer success at a place like Gainsight or a growth stage early type of startup.

Pradeep Raman:
Yeah. I think the discipline of customer success is something that’s really evolved rapidly. Right. You probably know it better than me, but certainly at Microsoft, we started customer success as much as pretty much a technical kind of sales support or sales assistant type of function. Right. Like, hey, this is the technical team that will assist the sales team. And we’ve gone through lots of evolutions and iterations and I think, you know, love the place we are in now and the place we are going forward, which is, you know, it is really not just customer success, but thinking about customer experience broadly. You know, the experience they have with Microsoft, with the company and how we shape that through our engagements, whether it’s support delivery, paid delivery, funded, invested, delivery, doesn’t matter every bit.

Pradeep Raman:
Every interaction point kind of really shapes the overall customer experience. And all of the interactions are focused on driving the success of the customer, which I love. So I think we are, we’ve evolved in so many ways over the years and really are at a point where we are seeing customer success and customer experience as an engine of growth for the company and an engine of acceleration. I think that’s the key word that I would use is how, you know, that we think about all the time is how do we accelerate the deployments, how do we accelerate the success of the customer? Not just kind of going along for the ride, but really making a difference

Josh Schachter [Host]:
in their journey, being there with them and remind us what part of the business are you in? What’s the product that you focus on?

Pradeep Raman:
Yeah, it’s cloud and AI platforms. So essentially the Azure business, we have three solution areas we manage, we cover at Microsoft, we kind of look at the Microsoft business through the lens of cloud and AI platforms. AI business solutions, which is all the productivity and business solutions offerings that we have, and security. So my role is focused on customer success. I own the drive, the business strategy for cloud and AI platforms, customer success. And also there’s a large initiative we are driving in the cloud and AI platforms for assisting customers with deployment. And my team kind of called the Cloud Accelerate Factory and my team owns and operates that initiative as well.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What’s the scope of that? Pradeep, if you’re able to share, I don’t know what’s public, what’s not, but generally size of the business approximately and the folks that are working within your team, can you give us any type of sense of the scope of your role?

Pradeep Raman:
Yeah, so it’s, you know, I have this dual kind of charter, if you will, of driving overall strategy, delivery strategy and this operation of if you will, of this Cloud Accelerate Factory, which is essentially a offering for a fully invested offering for customers from Microsoft to do hands on delivery and deployment at zero cost. Right. With the intent of jumpstarting their journey. So it’s not an open ended custom consulting, we’ll do everything for everybody type of scope. But every customer as they embark on a cloud project or a cloud journey, you know, I think will benefit and their success is accelerated if the cloud platform provider is, is in the boat with them. Right. And has skin in the game and kind of at least jump starting their journey. And that was really the thinking and the intent behind this was to say we wanted to make it simpler and easier for customers to make the decision to come to Azure.

Pradeep Raman:
It shouldn’t be such a complicated decision, especially when your source systems are also Microsoft if running on premises and you want to bring them to Azure. We just felt like that needs to be made simpler. And so this delivery investment to kind of help customers is kind of how it started was the focus on bringing Microsoft workloads to Azure and it’s evolved and grown from there to all Azure workloads. In terms of a team, I have about 180 or so people my org, we also have suppliers that we use to deliver these projects. We’ve done a few thousand projects globally. The cool thing about this investment and initiative is it’s really available to all customers, all segments, GEOs. There’s no minimum or maximum size but we’re really kind of taking the stance of saying, hey, if you have decided to come to Azure, we are in the boat with you and we will do that first part of the journey for you as a fully invested offering.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I mean it’s an investment because once they’re with Azure, they’re going to have a good experience.

Pradeep Raman:
Absolutely.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
They’re, they’re going to build their business on top of it. There’s going to be a lucrative longer term horizon for you once they’re in the ecosystem.

Pradeep Raman:
Exactly. Yes.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Pradeep Raman:
Well, I think the beautiful thing about the consumption business is it’s a, it’s by nature and by default a win win scenario for customers. I think, you know, they get value only when they deploy. No customer, you know, celebrates a victory when they sign an agreement with anyone. It’s only when they deploy projects they actually realize the value. And for us as the cloud platform provider, that is when we realize the value and that’s when we monetize, is when customers deploy. So it’s a beautiful model and I think us assisting customers to get deployed makes a ton of sense.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I like, I mean it’s aligned incentives. Right. Pure incentive.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Join me at Pulse this May in Las Vegas. I’d love to meet our listeners. Come say hi. And your daiquiri in that tall fluorescent cup is on me. Seriously. Use code unchurned for a special rate.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
At gainsightpulse.com we at Gainsight we practice the V2 mom approach. I think it was Salesforce that was the originator of it. Values, methods, measures, all those sorts of things. There’s obviously the OKR system and I think Google is big on that. What’s the system at Microsoft for your annual colds?

Pradeep Raman:
Yeah, so we have various forms. We’ve kind of leveraged a mix of all of that in the past. But we have our weekly rhythms, our monthly rhythms, our annual rhythms, kind of, there’s layers of KPIs that we focus on. There is top level OKRs we use at the org level. We do use OKRs to track overall org progress.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So what I want to know is what are the, you don’t have to share numbers or anything obviously but like what are the big rocks, the okrs, the big bets that you’re placing? We’re nearing the end of Q1 but for the remainder of the year what are the big priorities on your, your punch list?

Pradeep Raman:
Yeah, I mean I think generally speaking for customer success we’ve kind of defined the way we manage the business and drive the business is we really defined this top level KPI of measuring what percentage of committed customers once a customer has indicated that they are making a commitment to move to Azure or to deploy this project on Azure, what percentage of that are we completing or getting deployed on time? Right. And with full value and all of those things. So that is what we refer to as our job one metric. That is the job one metric is what is the commit to consume percentage for this week, this month by country, by workload, by, by all of the slices. That is a key metric that we drive. The other key metric we drive.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
When somebody comes on board there’s some type of forecast of here’s the ramp up plan that we’re going to have of, of our usage and consumption and then you’re, you’re helping them to onboard into the system and then tracking are they mapping to that ramp up plan?

Pradeep Raman:
Exactly. And, and we have forecasts and, and dates that we have forecasted in the plan and we measure ourselves by hitting, completing or deploying the project by that date with the full scope that was planned and all of those things. And then the other kind of related or big metric for a big focus for us is the next best action. Right. So every time I think as customer success professionals we have a great opportunity and great insight in the accounts usage patterns and usage data to say what is the next best thing for this customer to maximize the value of our platform. So we have a measure of did we create next best projects or next best deployment opportunities in every engagement, every time we go engage with the customer. So I think those two things are umbrella metrics if you will that are, you know, it’s not just end of the year but it’s throughout the year. It’s kind of how we run the business.

Pradeep Raman:
I think in terms of what’s top of mind now certainly the agentic AI and driving helping customer. You know one of the most common things I hear from customers is Kind of helping them accelerate, kind of move to production, deployment of how to use agents to impact their business. Right. So kind of, I think agentic deployment is top of mind and kind of closely related to that is the modernization priority. Because I think AI transformation is only as good as where your data and apps and everything is sitting right. If your data and apps are sitting in legacy environments, it’s very hard to really maximize the full potential of AI transformation. With agentic AI, it has really unlocked scenarios that previously were super complex and costly and so on. So I think those two priorities are really what we hear from customers and what we are kind of acting on.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you guys have a strong AI presence. How are you building AI enablement within your own team internally?

Pradeep Raman:
Yeah, good question. It’s something we talk about and try to live and implement really daily, weekly. Because I think one thing that’s common and I’ve seen throughout my 27 years at Microsoft, regardless of what role you’re in or org you’re in, there is always more work to do than hours in the day or resources or whatever. I think it’s by design, it’s how the company has been successful. If it takes n people to do a job, we like to have N minus 1 and still want the job to get done. And I think, you know, that, that of course has a snowball effect and catches up. Right. So everyone is, especially now the pace of progress in our industry with AI is, is intense.

Pradeep Raman:
The competitive landscape is intense and evolving fast. And you know, I think everyone has a lot on their plate to do. So using AI to make ourselves more productive is something we aggressively look at on a daily basis. There’s a lot of, of course, individual productivity things that, that we do with Copilot and, and using that as much as possible in everything that we do. But I think beyond that, it’s more about, we’re, you know, we’re now start kind of really rolling out custom agents that we developed to do specific process flows and, and specific business processes that need help with scaling.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And is there one that, is there one that you’re more excited about than others?

Pradeep Raman:
Yeah, I’ll give you a small example and I think this is applicable to any discipline or org in a company. When we’re doing a campaign or an initiative of any kind, typically there’s a, a life cycle of having a process for intake, for you know, for accepting nominations, reviewing it, approving it, and then going through the whole process of executing and that, you know, when your campaign or initiative really explodes in scale that can quickly become a bottleneck and there’s only so many humans you can keep adding to the intake process to keep up with processing denominations. And I think, you know, I’m super excited about the work we’re doing with agentic AI in having agents, kind of digital agents helping us with scaling that, that process flow and, and really enabling opening up our campaigns and initiatives to much more scale, which is what the company is looking for as well and what we aspire to do. So I think that’s one that. And so we have an analyst agent or an intake agent that does the processing, an architect agent that will review the data, listen to the. We feed the customer calls that we’ve been part of intuit and the transcripts into it and comes up with the recommendation of this is how we should address this customer’s need. And then there’s human review and validation and all of those things. But I think that, you know, so we’re living the agentic productivity benefits in that way.

Pradeep Raman:
And it’s super exciting.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I thought you say you’re living the agentic dream. Living the dream, yeah. Would you pretty. Would you have expected to be in this place 27 years ago when you started at Microsoft?

Pradeep Raman:
No. Funny story, but some other time is my. Is my interview process. I didn’t think I would survive 20 minutes of the interview. So to be here, to be here 27 years later is hard to believe.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, we’re glad you are. We’re glad you are. Thank you for showering us with your insights and with what you guys are up to within Microsoft. Super exciting things that you’re working on and yeah, thank you so much for joining the program.

Pradeep Raman:
Thank you, Josh. Thanks for having me. Congratulations on your great podcast and love that you’re shining the spotlight on the customer success, delivery discipline.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So we’re trying. Thank you.