Krishna Raj Raja, CEO and Founder of SupportLogic – Interview Series

Krishna Raj Raja,  is the CEO and Founder of SupportLogic, the world’s first continuous service experience (SX) management platform that enables companies to understand and act on the ‘Voice of the Customer’ in real-time to immediately improve service delivery and build healthy and profitable customer relationships.

You describe yourself as a “science geek”, what is it about the scientific world that has you so enamored?

To me, science is all about curiosity around how the world works and what patterns exist in the world. I’ve had this curiosity since childhood, and it has extended into my professional life. At SupportLogic, we are looking for patterns that exist in natural language, and using those patterns to predict things and provide recommendations. This is like science – it predicts patterns, provides recommendations and tells you how the world works. Much of what I have learned in my life is self-taught because it came from my natural curiosity, not from formal education.

You went on to get a degree in Chemical Engineering, but then ended up pursuing opportunities in computer science and machine learning. Could you discuss this pivot?

My dad was a successful business owner (in steel processing) and he hoped that one day I would take over the family business. Chemical engineering seemed to be the right training to have in order to be ready to do that. But computer science had been a side passion for me for a long time. In fact, my thesis for my chemical engineering degree was creating a software program for a chemical reactor design.

After I finished my chemical engineering degree, it became obvious that computer science was really my true passion. My computer science skills are completely self-taught, and when I joined VMware all of my colleagues had PhD’s from Ivy League schools in computer science. I was the most underqualified person on my team.

You were an early employee at VMware, where you worked in support & service as a product support engineer. What were some of the potential areas for improvement that you observed?

I was a software engineer that turned into a product support engineer. I joined VMware because their technology was fascinating – they were dealing with operating systems and I had a special interest in that. I was helping other operating system developers use VMware products on a daily basis. Because of my background, I was looking at things from two different angles: 1) How do I make this customer happy and resolve their issue; and 2) Why does this problem exist in the software, and how can it be fixed? I was looking at the product aspect of all the support issues. One of the first things I realized was that when product teams develop a product, they really don’t know how it will get deployed and used, so they don’t foresee a lot of things during the development process. However, the support team has a good handle on those issues and can give valuable feedback to the product teams as well as other departments in the company. The problem is that this feedback usually gets lost because the support team is focused on fixing a customer issue and then quickly moving on to the next issue. That important information does not get passed on.

Could you share some details on the genesis story for SupportLogic?

When I started SupportLogic, I looked at the market landscape for the support industry and I found that all of the innovations in the support space were focused on case deflection. This means that the best way to deal with support issues is to deflect them – away from support engineers, and away from the customers. This was in conflict with what I saw as a product support engineer – every customer interaction was an opportunity to learn about your customers and about how the product works and doesn’t work. But I was surprised to find that there were not tools out there to solve this (learning) problem, so I saw a big opportunity there.

Also, I noticed that support was…