Gowri Ramkumar, VP – Sales and Customer Success, Kovai.co
Nowadays, we are surrounded by women professionals utilizing new-age digital capabilities like AI, Cloud, machine learning, and data analytics to build their own SaaS products and solutions. Traditionally, these weren’t roles that women were hired for. However, despite the odds, many women product managers and Tech experts are leading the field by sharing their unique viewpoints an-*-9*/d representation. Women always have a certain degree of hunger to grow and prove their capabilities in leadership. This is clearly visible in Kovai.co with various team leads being women.
At Kovai.co, we continuously try and make our environment as inclusive as possible by providing plenty of opportunities to our workforce irrespective of gender and giving our employees space to express themselves and their talents. We host hackathon programs where women get to prove themselves in a friendly but competitive surrounding and win awards, courses which result in the accumulation of knowledge as well as valuable course certificates.
Besides these, another thing we do at Kovai.co is ensuring that people in leadership positions are open for a quick fireside chat with employees at any stage.
We are proud to say that over 40% of our workforce are women, and we like to see these numbers increasing.
Rangarajan Seshadri, CEO, Neeyamo
Neeyamo has always been invested in ensuring that there are plenty of job opportunities in tier-II cities, thereby reducing the need for employees to leave their hometowns in search of jobs. Thus, Neeyamo took this a notch higher and initiated the Naari Shakthi program from Nagpur. The Naari Shakthi framework was created to empower and create a platform for women to excel in IT/ ITES by creating high-end jobs for them.
The framework will be solely responsible for creating equal work opportunities for women. Under this program, the company is providing training and sessions with the leaders and experts from the industry to uplift, educate and ensure that the women employees further enhance their skills.
The overall framework has been structured so as to honour the achievement of our women employees. The centre at Nagpur currently has the capacity of 450-500 people across two shifts.
Nivedha Sridhar, Director, Marketing, Facilio
“Facilio began with the aim to declutter property operations, and this has been the north star of all our marketing and messaging efforts. I see my primary mission as conveying the value inherent in data-driven operations, to our customers, from the outset of their interaction with our marketing and messaging efforts. We constantly try to identify themes and build an empathetic connection with our customers – using webinars, events, and direct interviews—to understand the priorities that drive their decisions. We knew the knowledge gap between what operations teams needed, and what they’re currently equipped with, was growing. Our marketing engages, builds trust, and actively involves customers as part of this transformation. In 2019, we launched FutureProof, a community for professionals in property operations to come together and share practical best practices and strategies, to drive innovation in our space. As one of the co-creators of the event, it has been most satisfying to engage with the insights of progressive facility managers and commercial real estate leaders and help build a consensus for the future. Since then, we’ve taken FutureProof to multiple formats including video, interviews, and webinars, as well as the recent launch of REBuild, in the wake of the pandemic. Seeing the property operations community grow, share, and learn from each other through our facilitation has been extremely rewarding for us.
Our mission since day 1 has been clear—to help properties operate efficiently and sustainably. Every day is a prioritization exercise. As a member of the founding team, I’ve been lucky enough to define the priorities of the marketing function, as we regularly brainstorm with our co-founders and cross-team members. I see my primary mission as conveying the value inherent in data-driven operations, to our customers, from the outset of their interaction with our marketing and messaging efforts. Bringing about a tech-driven disruption in a conventional industry requires commitment across all functions, and it’s this holistic approach to delivering transformational value that our customers respond to the most. At Facilio, we’re committed to leaving no stone unturned in creating an environment where every voice has a seat at the table, regardless of gender, where we continuously learn and improve through dialogue, and where we aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo. Our objectives are aligned towards our larger goal of reimagining property operations, and we have a strong model and culture that passionately works towards this.
Our goal at Facilio is not just to create a new category of data-driven property operations, but to also help the industry evolve into a future-ready version of itself, driven by technology, data, and insights. This meant we needed to build a movement and not just a product. We were creating something that the market had not seen before, and it required us to define and evangelize it. As a team, we ingrained the discipline of removing limiting beliefs and followed the practice of experimentation, staying close to the customer, and deeply embracing a ‘figure it out’ mindset. Whether it’s through educational content, community engagement, category awareness, and product education via webinars, videos, etc., we try to help the operations industry transition towards a smarter, data-driven model of property operations. From there, we’ve grown to solve O&M gaps across 100m sq. ft at 35+ enterprises in the commercial office, healthcare, retail, banking, and government real estate categories; with marquee customers including a leading UK property owner/operator, a top bank HQ-ed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a leading commercial office player in Australia, a popular non-for-profit corporate in the US, and more.
It is important to keep a work-life balance too. Beyond my role at work, I’m also involved with a lot of initiatives to share our learnings regularly, at start-up growth workshops and student mentorship initiatives.”
Divya Ashok, VP Strategy and Innovation, Salesforce
“Today, conversations around diversity, equality, and inclusion have become important boardroom discussions given their impact on a company’s growth. With the evolution of technology, women in tech and leadership roles have seen significant growth over the last decade. There is a growing awareness around the need for diversity across sectors, for instance, a BCG study found that companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation.”
Anupama Kadambi, CXO, Chief Experience Officer, GOFRUGAL
Having come from an engineering background, I started my career at Hewlett Packard as a QA. I worked in the roles of software engineer, business consultant and project manager for the first 11 years of my career. Like many working women, I took a career break for 6 years, and restarted part-time in 2011.
I noticed that Gofrugal did not have a owner for the website and there was no digital marketing. I took ownership of the website and set up a digital marketing platform to promote our solutions. Having no experience in marketing before, I did a lot of self-learning to implement marketing-automation in our CRM. During those days, Hubspot was one of the early companies that kickstarted marketing automation. I used to keep a watch on the trends in smashing magazine, Unbounce, Neil Patel. I have executed 1000+ experiments, design variations, experiences, and process improvements. My favorite pass time was trying different products / applications in the market and studying their experiences.
One advice on leadership decisions is ‘Where-ever there is a lack of leadership, identify them early, own and drive them’. The bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity!
After 8 years as a CMO, I realized the customer attrition was high especially the first year. As a CXO, I realized I needed to get deep into details, identify problem areas. I reviewed touch point experiences-calibrated the process, defined right metrics, segmented customer data. Proactive customer-success calls helped predict customer effort, identify churn early.
It is important to promote people who are accountable, innovate, proactively identify and resolve problems. We were able to boost our renewals significantly. The book ‘Effortless Experience’ & ‘Power of Moments’ was an eye-opener for me. I kept listening to podcasts on design and customer success like Creating Customer Success, Customer Success Leader, UI Breakfast UI/UX design and product strategy.
Wearing multiple hats & being cross-skilled gave a lot more perspective. My vision is to build a customer-centric organization as the success of a company depends 50% on customer success and the rest 50% on employee engagement and their success.
Behind great experience is a streamlined process. It is the responsibility of the CX teams to improve experience thus building/re-building trust with the customers. I may not have reached the destination, but I am making progress every single day. The journey so far has been rollicking!
Radha Basu, Founder & CEO, iMerit
Every day I have the unique opportunity to see women leaders overcome challenges that allow them to reach their full potential. A recent Mckinsey survey suggests that women exhibit leadership traits that are highly applicable to the global challenges of the future. The technology industry I work in is young and constantly evolving. There is an increased demand for a workforce with completely different and hard-to-define skill sets. Women are embracing and developing these skills like never before. More women are achieving financial inclusion and financial independence, allowing a large section of our society to think big, dream big and achieve big.
