“How did they do that? How did they get there?” Companies succeed because of the people who build them - operating leaders who grow businesses to new heights and make decisions every day that can impact entire industries. Each month, our Operator Spotlight gives you the inside track from one of our incredible Operator LPs (Limited Partners) who are changing the game – building and scaling some of the world’s most successful companies. Read on for lessons learned and mistakes made, perspectives from the top, practical advice, and ideas on what’s next.

This month, we chatted with Harini Gokul, Chief Customer Officer at cybersecurity company Entrust. Harini is a global business leader accelerating innovation, transformation, and value realization for customers ranging from Fortune 500 enterprises to startups. In her two decades of leadership roles at Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), she has built industry-defining customer experience models and successfully scaled organizations in hypergrowth environments. At Entrust, Harini leads a 400+ global team to drive $300M+ P&L, builds and scales the global Go-To-Market strategy, and participates in M&A transactions.

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Tell us a bit about your career journey from 14 years at Microsoft (!) to Amazon and Entrust. What have been the motivations that propelled you to each of your roles?

Harini: There are three themes that have guided my choices consistently across my professional life:

1. As a recovering engineer, I am a builder at heart. I am drawn to building businesses from scratch or to complex situations that need simplifying. At Microsoft, one of my roles included moving to Western Europe to create a model and organization to accelerate cloud adoption in that region. Another role was helping build the largest customer success organization in the industry. At Amazon Web Services, I incubated the Customer Success model for software providers and private enquiry firms.
2. I enjoy technology. And I enjoy solving human problems with technology even more. One of my first roles was to lead the implementation of ATMs in rural India. While I enjoyed the technology aspect, what really gave me joy was that the ATMs would help farmers in rural India access their funds conveniently. The theme of using technology to solve human problems has been consistent throughout my professional life.
3. Be Curious - This is one of my core values. I am intensely curious and enjoy learning. I thrive in areas that are new to me. When I started at Entrust, I immersed myself in cybersecurity and dove deep to get to know the space, the technology, and our customers. I am very comfortable asking questions in seeking to understand and I find that helps build trust and credibility with customers, peers, and teams

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The Chief Customer Officer is a title that has significantly evolved over the last decade. How do you define the role and what’s your perspective on its evolution?

Harini: Many of us did this role before we were called Chief Customer Officers (CCO). Early CCOs were more of a “Customer Service Officer” whose primary focus was on customer service and retention. Their efforts were centered on keeping customers happy and putting out any fires.

The CCO role is now evolving into more of a “Customer Growth Officer,” focused on driving profitable customer strategy at all levels of the company with the goals of retaining and growing customers for greater revenue, growth and profitability. This evolution reflects the changing shape of revenue, driven by subscription and software as a service models.

In my role at Entrust, I lead customer on-boarding, implementation and deployment, customer success, renewals, and technical support functions. Three aspects of the role that I enjoy are:

1. Breadth and Range required - I like that the CCO mandate is broad as it requires strategic thinking and functional knowledge as well as an appetite to understand all facets of the company from engineering to finance. Asking the right questions and staying curious is key to success.
2. Financial Accountability – Many CCOs like me are accountable for their recurring revenues including renewals and expansions. This helps me span multiple altitudes, from creating the strategy to successfully executing commercially. One without the other would not have the same impact.
3. Customer engagement – It goes without saying that being able to deliver value to the customer, addressing their priorities, and raising the bar of what they should expect from us is what energizes me.

In my perspective, here are the fundamental CCO imperatives:

• Create a Customer-Obsessed Company Culture: We will fail if the Chief Customer Officer or their teams are perceived as the only ones that care about the customer. The CCO’s charter should be that all employees—customer facing or not—should be customer-first. To ensure this customer empathy, a CCO has to create relevant customer narratives, mechanisms, incentives, and communities so employees understand the value of being customer-first.
• Build an Internal “Coalition of Allies”: CCOs do not operate independently. To ensure broad commitment and cooperation, they must partner with their peers, leaders and employees at every level of the organization to embrace, advance, and prioritize customer priorities.
• Secure and Grow the Customer Base: CCOs must define the strategy needed to secure and grow the base, identify customer segments to target, bring voice of customer back into the organization, and make sure that key capabilities such as onboarding, implementation or technical support are addressing customer needs.
• Demonstrate Value to the CEO, Board, and Shareholders: In part, because we are still in the nascent stage of the role, CCOs must be able to demonstrate effectiveness in making progress on cultural change, performance against goals, and ability to strategically map the voice of customer to key company priorities.

Few corporate positions are as new yet as key as the Chief Customer Officer. As the voice of the customer gets stronger and more influential, I expect the role and the influence of the CCO to continue to expand.

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What is something people often get wrong about customer success?

Harini: People underestimate the value of customer success and often think customer success is in the business of just making customers happy. Not true. Customer success is in the business of helping to make customers successful and driving growth.

In the early days when the term “customer success” was first coined, it was an umbrella function that brought together a set of roles that served the customer. And it was viewed as an inherently reactive and transactional function that was not linked to revenue. Customer complaint? Question? Issue? Onboarding trouble? Send it to the “Customer Success” team and move on.

Now that we have matured as an industry and as a community, most SaaS businesses realize the importance of proactive customer engagement and driving customer outcomes. We have matured from being viewed as a “put out the fire,” role to a strategic growth-driver.

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What is the relationship between customer success and growth, and how are you implementing that at Entrust?

Harini: Customer success and growth are two sides of the same coin.

When you think of the reality of the subscription-driven tech ecosystem, customers expect to see continuous value from their software investment and realize the business outcomes they set out to achieve. All of this needs to happen with agility, in the shortest amount of time. When we make this happen for customers, we create advocates and a flywheel for efficient growth. And all businesses today, regardless of size or maturity, care about efficient growth. Customer Success is the key to making the value and growth flywheel spin faster. And that is why Customer Success is an enabler and accelerator of efficient growth.

And that is how we envision the role at Entrust, as a data-driven, revenue-driven, growth-driven function that helps us increase revenue, increase retention, create more expansion opportunities, and create customer advocates. Our guiding tenets start with the formula that Growth = Retention + Expansion. We make the strategy real with a customer-led lifecycle model that focuses on:

1. Adoption: We work backwards from customer needs to drive time to value and seamless on-boarding experience. On an ongoing basis, we leverage product telemetry to understand customer usage and opportunities to improve customer time to value.
2. Engagement: We invest in fostering continuous engagement with customers. This includes running the business engagement with our account teams, relationship building at all levels of the customer organization, executive sponsorship, and amplifying with digital tools and automation (such as Gainsight – another OpCo community member!). This results in building trust and developing a deep understanding of our customers’ business, their priorities, and their customer needs.
3. Usage: For our consumption businesses, we want to deeply understand usage and the levers that drive usage. This is key to making sure customers are making full use of our solutions. This understanding helps us proactively identify new use cases to serve the customer, resulting in new growth and expansion.
4. Advocacy: We prioritize building and fostering customer communities. These curated communities are for bi-directional dialog and provide us valuable feedback to shape our roadmap and create better customer experiences.
5. Culture: We are a customer-first culture and are setting up mechanisms, models, and incentives to make Customer Success an integral part of a company's culture. This includes aligning incentives to measure customer retention and growth (via Gross Revenue Retention and Net Revenue Retention), celebrating and rewarding our colleagues for their customer-first behavior (via our Game Changer Awards) and curating customer communities via our Customer Advisory Boards.
6. Data: Data is the bedrock of all that we do - as a data driven culture, we wallow in customer data and telemetry to understand leading indicators and signals proactively (such as product usage, customer health, stakeholder health), and track progress against our growth goals.

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Identity and digital security is a hot topic, what are some of your customers biggest concerns in this rapidly changing environment?

Harini: As our pace of digital adoption accelerates in all areas of our lives from banking to travel, Identity will be the most valuable commodity for customers and citizens in the future, and it will exist primarily online. It was once normal to head to your local bank branch to open an account, or approve a transaction, many of these operations have moved to a digital online model. In the future, it is likely that customers will expect to have a single digital identity for them, one that connects their physical and digital behavior not only within individual organizations, but across multiple organizations and governments.

This has caused a much greater need for online digital identification. It also presents a new challenge — how to accurately determine the identity of a person online. In other words, how to tell if someone is who they say they are, online?  And getting this digital identity right is critical.

And we have an uphill path ahead as the current state of digital identity is more of a patchwork of differing identities across government and commercial systems with the average internet user having over 100 accounts that require a password. All of us, including our customers, are concerned that this fragmented approach to digital identity is ripe for abuse by bad actors seeking to perpetrate synthetic identity fraud, which is being fueled further by generative AI. With the use of deepfakes on the rise — Onfido (an Entrust company) found a 3,000% year-on-year increase in the volume of deepfake attempts. Some experts predict that up to 90% of online content could be synthetically generated within a few years, which will only add fuel to the fire around the question ‘what is real’ and ‘what is fake’? This could show up as fraud in a banking environment or disinformation in a political environment.

With an increase in digital interactions, the volume of customer data held by organizations has also grown. This data availability offers a significant opportunity to use analytics to better understand customers and provide more effective and personalized customer contact and user journeys. But simultaneously, the increase in data has led to an increased risk of cybercrime. Privacy obligations have grown and compliance is a bigger challenge.

This is translating to what customers care about on digital identity, including:

• Security: Customers want to be protected from identity theft, fraud, and data breaches. They also want to be able to easily access their accounts without being slowed down by complex authentication or on-boarding processes. So businesses are working to create a security environment that balances customer experience with reduced fraud. This is translating io greater use of biometrics, phishing-resistant, passwordless Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)  and digital identities  that  can verify credentials, attributes and identity behind the scene so organizations can better protect their customers’ personal data in each and every digital transaction.
• Privacy and Trust: Customers want to understand and have control over how their personal data is used. Customers want to be able to trust that their data is being handled securely and conveniently.
• Have a “Single Pane of Glass” experience: Customers want a personalized and seamless hybrid experience that allows them to span their physical and digital environments easily, and to be recognized across multiple devices and channels. An example of this hybrid identity is the use of biometric client identification in retail stores which helps identify a customer in a physical store and also manages their digital interactions so their purchases are charged automatically into their credit card when on leaving without the need to physically check out.

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How have you made a mark in your industry? What’s something you’ve done that’s perhaps counterintuitive in your field - broken any rules with interesting results?

Harini: As a recovering engineer, being close to technology and data has always been very important to me. And I have dialed up the importance of those two lenses in my commercial role. I have focused on strengthening technical expertise of the Customer facing teams, building closer connections with product and engineering, and leveraging telemetry and data for more intentional and intelligent customer engagement.

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You are also an elected council member for your city in Washington State, serving a second term - how has volunteering for your city made you a better leader?

Harini: Having been through the GDPR chapter in Europe, I was keenly aware of the symbiotic relationship between technology and policy and was a big advocate for bridge-building between governments and businesses to solve important problems for our societies, be it cyber-security or AI. I wanted to walk the talk, so I decided to run for city council. As an elected city council member, I am learning how technology shapes policies and laws and the impact of technology decisions on communities and societies. And as an operator, it has been helpful for me to add a policy lens to my perspective. Now when I work with governments, I have a better understanding of the problems they are looking to solve, and their constraints that we can help address.

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What’s a piece of advice you would give to yourself 10 years ago, if you had the opportunity?

Harini: Take more risks, and enjoy the adventures. When I started my professional career, I had a vision of what my path would look like. And then of course life happened, I took on roles outside the U.S in countries like the Netherlands, and Switzerland and learnt to say Hello and Thank You to customers in 15 different European languages. These unplanned adventures resulted in the most enriching professional experiences of my life. And as I took these risks, I gained the confidence to do more, and to take on more.

At Amazon, this risk taking is called the “Two Way Door.” Most of the decisions in life can be reversed so why do we stop ourselves from walking through these doors? So my only advice to my younger self is to use the Two Way Door to take more risks, take more adventures, and take the path less trodden.

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What’s your secret super power?

Harini: I enjoy pattern matching, spanning altitudes, and being connective tissue across a range of diverse topics. So range is my secret superpower. And especially in the C Suite and in my role, I think that is an important capability - to be able to look left to right, dive into the details and be able to elevate altitude to discern patterns and connect the dots. This has helped me be successful as I learn new spaces such as cybersecurity or new functions such as building customer success from scratch at a time when the function was very nascent in its maturity and the value of CX and CCO was yet to be understood fully. One of my favorite books on this topic is Range by David Epstein.