Kaseya adds new Chief Customer Officer to improve focus of customer success program

This is one in many steps in what Kaseya promises will be a massive initiative in greater commitment to its MSP customers.

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Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola

Little over a month ago, remote management and monitoring software provider Kaseya appointed Fred Voccola as its CEO, with former CEO Yogesh Gupta moving to the role of Kaseya’s Chairman of the Board. At that time, Voccola, who said that he was brought in to lead the company through an upcoming rapid growth phase, pledged that a key part of this would be a “massive new initiative” in customer commitment. Today he is delivering on that, with the announcement of the appointment of Alex Cuevas as Kaseya’s first ever Chief Customer Officer, as well as enhanced resources in the customer success area.

“We always had a customer experience program in place before, but we never had a Chief Customer Officer,” Voccola said. “The different is that having one senior executive who owns all parts of the customer experience will improve focus. It means having someone who is singularly focused on making sure that customer experience is world class and that their success is measured and quantified.”

Voccola said Cuevas, with whom he has a long past history, is that person.

“I have worked with Alex for 15 years at different companies, and have had amazing experiences,” he said. This most recently included Yodle, where Cuevas served as VP of Customer Success while Voccola was President and General Manager of the Brand Networks Division. The two men also both worked at Nolio, CA Technologies, Identify Software and BMC.

In addition to the new executive position, Kaseya is also announcing new investments in both people and systems in its customer success program, which Voccola estimated at $USD 4,000,000. The new resources will be directed towards an advanced onboarding process, customer training and education programs, relationship support, professional services, and other customer enablement tools and services.

“The next 90 days will see customer experience fully implemented and on board, with extensive customer dashboarding,” Voccola said. “The customers might not see it but we will have that capability. There will also be a much smoother communication process.” Major investments have been made in bi-directional customer communication channels to facilitate new levels of feedback and ongoing interactions with the product, services, and relationship teams. New investment in the Kaseya Community as a forum for interaction will generate additional advisory feedback, Voccola added.

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Alex Cuevas, Kaseya’s first Chief Customer Officer

“The extra four million put into the organization to leverage value will turn up in things like usage and licensing assistance, training and education,” Cuevas said. “The onboarding journey with training and education is important, we also have to look at their business goals, and ask ourselves if they are receiving value on an individualized basis. Does the customer hit their marks?”

Cuevas said over the next few weeks, Kaseya will figure out how to best deploy the new resources.

“What matters isn’t the pure number of support people assigned, but the number needed to be proactive and not reactive, and that can vary a lot depending on the size of the customer and their usage,” Voccola said. “A customer success organization needs to be proactive. For example, with a cloud offering, we can see what features they use and what they don’t, create policies which are rule driven, and if they don’t reflect best practices it allows us to outreach to them.”

Cuevas said Kaseya’s business in Canada has taken off since the acquisition of Chilliwack B.C.-based Scorpion Software and their AuthAnvil identity and access management solutions. Dana Epp, Scorpion’s CEO, became Kaseya’s CTO.

“We plan on adding about 15 new people in Canada, of whom many will be customer success people,” Cuevas said. “We have a really good thing with the culture of our office there – really good talent.”