Mastering Mission-Critical Customer Success

Pari: Welcome everyone to a new episode of the Zinnov Podcast, part of our Business Resilience Series. I’m your host today, Pari Natarajan, and we are excited to have a special guest with us—Sarv Saravanan, Chief Customer Officer at Commvault. Sarv is a great friend and a leader dedicated to delivering exceptional customer experiences at Commvault.

Before joining Commvault, Sarv held leadership roles at both Microsoft and Dell, where he built world-class global engineering and service delivery organizations. Over the next 20 minutes or so, we’ll be diving into the evolving world of customer success, particularly in modern enterprise software companies, and how customer success teams are creating value for both the organizations they serve and their customers.

Welcome, Sarv! Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Sarv: Thanks, Pari. It’s great to be here, and I appreciate you having me.

Pari: Tell us a bit about Commvault 2.0. What pain points is Commvault addressing for customers, and what role does customer success play in solving these issues?

Sarv: Let’s start with Commvault’s evolution. For over 25 years, we’ve been known as a leader in data protection, backup, and recovery. In the last five years, we’ve transformed into a modern cloud platform company, with a strong SaaS business. We believe our platform is ideal for hybrid enterprises.

The shift we’re addressing is from traditional data protection to cyber resilience. No matter how robust your security is, breaches can still occur. Our goal is to help companies answer one key question: Are they ready to recover? We assume breaches will happen, and the focus is on how quickly they can recover when it does.

Pari: So, regardless of the protections in place, something can still happen, and your focus is on ensuring preparedness.

Sarv: Absolutely. My role at Commvault extends beyond traditional customer success. When I joined, the mandate was to simplify the entire customer journey and deliver a best-in-class experience. That meant looking at the customer journey end-to-end, removing any friction, and making sure that at every stage—whether it’s awareness, purchasing, deploying, or renewing—customers have a seamless experience.

Customer success teams play a crucial role in ensuring that once the customer chooses our platform, they get the outcomes they need, like faster recovery and cyber resilience. We focus on making sure customers feel supported at every step, and ultimately, increasing the lifetime value of the relationship.

Pari: And how does customer success fit into this? What is the role of the customer success organization?

Sarv: For us, customer success goes beyond just the typical function of customer success. The charter given to me when I joined the company was to simplify the customer journey end-to-end and deliver the best-in-class customer experience. So, we started by looking at the customer journey and streamlining it.

We removed the friction points, brought more clarity to the roles involved at different stages of the customer journey, streamlined processes, and ensured that customers have a great experience at every stage.

Ultimately, the goal is to make the journey friction-free and, of course, increase the lifetime value of the customer.

Pari: So, what is this customer value chain? You mentioned the customer journey—what are the key aspects?

Sarv: We’ve broken our customer journey into six phases. The first is awareness—how do we create awareness around our value proposition?

Next is shopping—how do we ensure customers understand our proposition?

Then comes the shopping experience, whether it’s a traditional purchase or buying through SaaS, online or other channels—we’ve simplified the process.

The fourth and fifth phases are deploy and use, and the final phase is love—when customers fully appreciate the value of our product.

Each phase is clearly defined, with streamlined workflows, ensuring everyone involved knows exactly what needs to be done to deliver a great customer experience. This is the essence of our customer journey map.

Pari: And different parts of the organization touch these phases, right? Marketing comes in during awareness, sales teams later, then you have partners, resellers, support staff, training, implementation, and renewals. How do you bring them all together when each has different SLAs?

Sarv: The key is ensuring everyone is clear about their role in each phase. Marketing leads awareness, making sure customers have the right information during the shopping phase. Sales runs campaigns during shopping, and then operations and sales collaborate in the buying phase. After that, customer success takes over, supported by professional services and other post-sales functions.

We align on the customer’s goals through a Customer Success Plan, which sets the expected outcomes. From there, ensuring smooth deployment, integration, and product use is part of the plan, with each post-sales function knowing their role in achieving customer success.

Pari: How do you measure customer success? NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a big metric we often hear about. Is NPS the gold standard for customer success and experience, or are there other metrics you use?

Sarv: While customer success is its own function, it goes beyond just that. Support, professional services, and pre-sales all contribute to making customer success happen.

Success, for us, means the customer is fully deploying and using the product to meet their goals. We measure customer experience through NPS, but it’s not just about NPS. We also track Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) and Net Revenue Retention (NRR). GRR measures if customers are renewing with us, and NRR tracks whether they’re expanding their usage—whether it’s new workloads or growing their overall consumption of the platform.

So, our customer success metrics include NPS, GRR, and NRR to ensure customers are achieving their outcomes and growing with us.

Pari: That’s really interesting. Can you share a “war story” where you turned around a client relationship and made a meaningful impact for both Commvault and the customer?

Sarv: Absolutely. Most of the major “war stories” we deal with are related to ransomware attacks. It’s unfortunate, but they do happen, and when they do, we’re immediately on call to help.

One recent case involved a client who didn’t fully appreciate Commvault’s importance before the attack. But during the ransomware incident, they realized just how crucial our platform was to their recovery process.

Pari: It sounds like you become mission-critical at that point. After an event like that, customers must take your platform much more seriously.

Sarv: Exactly. Events like these wake customers up to the importance of data protection and resilience. Previously, some companies treated it like an insurance policy—nice to have, but not a priority. Now, they realize it needs to be tightly integrated with their security stack. It’s essential that recovery processes are well-tested, including ransomware recovery tests during tabletops, with updated processes to ensure readiness.

Pari: Does part of your customer success team’s role involve making customers aware of what they need to do beyond just using the solution they’ve purchased from you?

Sarv: Yes, that’s becoming an increasingly important part of the post-sales team—not just customer success, but also professional services and pre-sales. We bring value by helping customers achieve full cyber resilience, which we break down into four components:

1. Risk management – Are the right controls in place?
2. Readiness – Are processes well-tested?
3. Recovery – Can you detect anomalies and recover quickly?
4. Rebuild – How do you rebuild your infrastructure?

All of these are critical for achieving the bigger “R”—resilience.

Pari: And you’re managing thousands of customers, right? I imagine your team could always use more people. How is AI helping in this effort?

Sarv: Absolutely, AI is critical for scaling our efforts. We’ve deployed an AI assistant called Aalis, which supports both our engineers and customers.

Aalis helps us respond to incidents faster, while also enabling customers to self-serve and automate their management processes. We’ve integrated it with Dynamics, our customer support platform, to automate workflows and reduce response times.

Pari: That’s interesting. So AI isn’t just for your internal teams—customers are using it directly as well?

Sarv: Exactly. We want customers to support themselves, automate administrative tasks, and integrate our platform with their existing systems. All of this is possible through Aalis.

Additionally, we’re heavily investing in automating the entire customer journey. By collecting telemetry from our products, we can understand where customers are in their journey. This gives every team—whether it’s customer success, professional services, or pre-sales—a clear view of the customer’s current status.

Pari: So, you’re linking telemetry data from your product, CRM data about the customer’s renewal cycle, and field support queries. By stitching all of this together, you’re providing insights and recommended actions to the right teams. Is that correct?

Sarv: Exactly. We’re actively investing in this. With the telemetry we gather, we can recommend next-best actions to various team members. The goal is to provide insights, track consumption growth, identify potential blockers, and flag issues early. This way, the renewal team is informed well in advance—at least a quarter before renewal—about any possible challenges.

Pari: One last area I want to touch on is partner enablement. For many companies, more revenue is coming from partners who are reselling or implementing their products. Is partner success a key part of customer success, and how do you integrate that?

Sarv: Yes, partner enablement is a crucial aspect of my role as Chief Customer Officer. I oversee pre-sales, post-sales, customer success, renewals, and partner enablement.

If our partners know our product well, they deliver better services. And if they understand our product’s value better than the competition, they’ll sell more of it. So, we focus not only on technical training but also on educating partners about the value of our products and roadmap. This helps them plan their service offerings in advance and ensures they’re equipped to position us effectively.

Pari: So, if a large systems integrator has a cybersecurity offering, your product would automatically fit into their solution stack, right?

Sarv: Exactly. It’s not just about reselling. There’s a sales component, a solution architecting component, and the technical aspect. Partners need to be well-prepared on all fronts.

Pari: Sarv, you’ve been in this role for about six months. What leadership traits have you found yourself relying on the most?

Sarv: In this role, I see myself as a partner to the Chief Revenue Officer. Customer success and sales are constantly in front of the customer. The three key leadership traits I rely on are:

1. Building relationships – With both large customers and partners.
2. Cross-functional understanding – Bringing diverse teams together to work towards a common goal.
3. Technology savviness – Understanding where technology is headed and influencing the product roadmap.

Interestingly, I also oversee product management. This ensures that customer success-driven initiatives and product-led growth are integrated into the roadmap, so the customer experience is built in from the start.

Pari: You’ve mentioned cross-functional collaboration. Marketing isn’t part of customer success, but it touches it, as do sales, professional services, and customer support. How do you bring all these teams together?

Sarv: That’s where cross-functional experience is critical. Bringing these diverse functions together and ensuring everyone is aligned is key. Working closely with the CEO and CRO to build strong relationships with customers and partners is also essential.

Pari: You’re also involved in board discussions, right?

Sarv: Yes, the CEO includes key members of the leadership team in board conversations. Just yesterday, I presented our priorities for the financial year, which runs from April to March.

Pari: One last question: you’re leading this global customer success role from Asia. What are the advantages of managing a large customer success organization for a global enterprise software company from Asia?

Sarv: What helped me a lot was my experience at EMC, Dell EMC, and Microsoft, where I built cross-functional teams and worked across various parts of the organization—from engineering to services to support.

At Commvault, we have a significant engineering and services presence in India, which allows me to more easily influence my team and bring them together to solve major customer challenges. Having a large, cross-functional resource base in one location enables us to solve problems faster and more efficiently.

Pari: Great. Thanks, Sarv, for sharing your insights on building a modern customer success organization and its impact, particularly in mission-critical areas like cybersecurity resilience. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m sure our audience will too.

Sarv: Thanks, Pari. It was great to be here.