Successful businesses have one thing in common: successful customers. This fundamental premise drives today's subscription economy leading to the evolution of the Customer Success industry. Pioneering the use of augmented intelligence and constantly pushing the boundaries of innovation, SmartKarrot has been at the forefront of this change.

SmartKarrot is an intelligent and actionable customer success platform that focuses on enabling predictable and repeatable business growth. Customer-centric enterprises and businesses across global industries use the company's product to drive successful customer onboarding, adoption, engagement, retention, and revenue growth at scale.

A Visionary Leader  

Prithwi Dasgupta is the CEO and Co-Founder of SmartKarrot. He is an experienced business leader with more than 22 years of business management experience. Before starting SmartKarrot, Prithwi was the President of the technology business unit of a healthcare IT firm, where he was leading a team of over 1500 professionals.

Incorporating Learning to Leverage Intelligent Customer Success Solutions

Prithwi mentions, when he grew his business unit, he had to set up the account management and client services function from the grassroots. On one hand, while it was sales that got the company entry into the accounts, on the other hand, it was this team that managed, grew, and retained the business. This gave Prithwi a great vision as to what it takes to manage net recurring revenue as a B2B business. He carried a large part of that learning into building SmartKarrot and its value proposition of being an intelligent customer success solution.

Intelligent Automation that Helps Solve Problems

Prithwi shares that SmartKarrot was launched in the pandemic year, so he expressed that their operations have been entirely virtual from the very first day. And this was something the team had to take in as a stride and adapt to with some difficulty. Even though the company is angel-funded, it was a challenge to conduct the fund-raising activities virtually where the whole world was surrounded by the industry's uncertainty. But the company's value proposition of solving complex problems using intelligent automation, however, got perfectly aligned with the needs of the industry, and the challenges it may face post-pandemic helped the team immensely.

Traits that Every Leader Should Possess

Prithwi asserts that the ability to connect accurate technology to solve a genuine industry problem is the first thing that leaders should consider. He adds that they should also possess the skill to simplify and explain complex technical solutions in a manner that is relevant and understandable by both, internal and external stakeholders.

Deploying New-Age Solutions with Innovation

"Innovation is primarily driven by the broad market and customer needs" believes Prithwi. And talking about how innovation drives the industry, he says that the legacy systems in customer success stop at basic data aggregation." SmartKarrot is taking this to the next level by working with intelligence and automation simultaneously. Modern organizations need new-age predictive and prescriptive solutions, and that is what SmartKarrot provides" he adds.

Disruptive Technologies that Impact Three Simple Progressions

Prithwi verbalizes the three simple progressions of the impact that he thinks about when it comes to disruptive technologies. Firstly, the cloud leads to the growth of SaaS and the subscription-driven recurring revenue challenge, secondly, multiple systems and data sources lead to big data solutions. And at last, AI helps to sieve out, learn, connect, co-relate, and make the static data sets actionable.

The Future with Enhanced Customer Experiences

The software-as-a-service industry is estimated to be over US$300 billion and growing at a CAGR of over 25%. While the growth has been rapid, the focus is now on retaining and growing an existing book of business by showcasing the value and enhancing customer experiences.

Prithwi enunciates that the ability to grow the net recurring revenue is the single most important aspect of a SaaS business. "It is a complex problem with multiple people, processes and systems involved. The need of the hour is to provide organizations with the right intelligence connected to the right actions and automation. This is the gap that SmartKarrot fills with its intelligent customer success platform" claims Prithwi.

An Advice for the Budding Tech Leaders

Prithwi advises the budding tech leaders to stay equally focused on the use cases as they would on the technology. "It is also crucial to be wary of the AI Buzz- industry misuse and propagation that AI will solve any problem. Being grounded in what AI brings to the table will make the latest solutions more business-relevant" he concludes.