Her Story
About Anuja
I've been in my field for almost 11 years, and I'm currently a Senior Enterprise Customer Success Manager, a role I've held for about two years. Throughout my career, I've worked with various SaaS companies across different sectors. I've worked with CRM platforms similar to Salesforce, Freshworks, and Zendesk, as well as HR SaaS companies that help improve interview processes and use psychometric assessments to hire the right talent. I've also worked in fintech, helping companies get an overview of how their money is moving. Currently, I work at Zendesk, an AI company, where I manage a book of business worth around 10 to 15 million dollars. I work with enterprise customers and higher-up brands like SeatGeek, Reddit, and Rockstar Games. My day-to-day is pretty intense - I work with these customers to ensure they're using the platform well, drive AI strategy toward their vision for customer support, prep for internal processes to improve cross-functional work between my team and product teams, and sometimes conduct interviews. One of my proudest achievements this year was winning back a really big customer we were about to lose due to product issues. It involved managing internal stakeholders at the C-level, and we ended up winning that customer back rather than losing them to competitors. I've also been involved in training our newer team members around culture and how to converse around these topics, which has been really rewarding.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Anuja
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I think there are a lot of opportunities out there to find the right one, but it can always be so hard. The way I think about it, unless you jump in the water, you can't really know what the temperature is, so you've got to put in all the efforts and show up. There will be days which will be extremely hard, and you're not going to win all the time, but what you learn through it is super important. You basically go out there and be yourself and jump in the water rather than staying on the outside being like, I'm not sure, I don't know. There are so many ifs and maybes and buts, but you need to get in the dirt and play and understand. It's okay to lose, but then you learn through whatever you've lost, and then you keep moving up. You have to keep at it, keep learning, and ensure that you keep learning and moving forward.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think it's just that at the pace that AI is growing, it's so hard to keep up. It's extremely hard to kind of keep up and keep upgrading yourself with the available knowledge. There is also this kind of worry of how do you ensure balance - I wouldn't necessarily say how it's affecting customer service business because people are losing a lot of jobs, but trying to find that balance between ensuring that you can bring AI and actually help humans through it, rather than humans losing their job or having that perspective. I think that's something that is extremely hard. But hopefully, at least we are working towards ensuring that we can try.
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