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In this edition of Life @ Netskope, we sat down Joshua Livingstone, the Director of Customer Success in the Asia-Pacific region. Joshua has been with Netskope for a year, but was no stranger to the cybersecurity and CASB space before, having previously worked for Skyhigh, which was later acquired by McAfee. Check out our conversation with Joshua below to hear a bit more about his first year with Netskope:
What made you choose Netskope?
I was working with another vendor in the CASB space, and there were a whole raft of reasons why I chose Netskope, one of the biggest ones from a technology perspective is the use cases. As I was having conversations with customers, they kept on coming up with use cases that, you know, I just didn’t have an answer for based on the technology and I knew Netskope had the answer for it. I was offered a role in customer success in Australia looking after the Asia Pacific region and I jumped at the chance to move on to a role where I have an opportunity to shape the region and I haven’t looked back!
How does Netskope’s approach to customer success differ from the approaches in your past roles?
I came from an old school type of customer success where there was a support team and they’re there to help customers with the problem, then they throw customer success on top of that. And it’s really just another layer of helping a customer with a technical sort of problem. But customers don’t just want to have a person that they can reach out to if there’s a technical issue. They want to have proactive guidance on the technology. They want to understand all the best practices and methodologies. With Netskope we’re taking the customers through a whole journey. After our salespeople have done a fantastic job in selling the products, customers aren’t just left to their own devices to work their way around the products and not really understand it. I’ve had a really good opportunity with Netskope to help change these methodologies. That’s the exciting part for me, is being able to make a really big difference, not just for our own customer experience organization, but also for the actual customers. The feedback that we get from customers about how much love and attention they get from us compared to many other vendors is massive. They are saying things like “they’ve never had another vendor that treats them that way.” So that’s what I love about Netskope’s methodologies and the focus on customer experience. It’s not just a placeholder to say, “Yes, we have customer experience.” We are actually doing something groundbreaking and we’re really leading the way.
What is one of your favorite or best memories or coolest experiences from working with Netskope?
Oh, there are so many, but I guess I can say overall, the experience that I feel is really important is, if I come up with an idea to improve the business, everyone is all ears. There’s nothing that I would say where anyone would shut me down. I feel it’s a great testament to the collaborative behavior we have baked into the whole Netskope culture. You can say what you want and you’ll be listened to. And potentially the ideas that you come up with are added into processes. For example, I’ve been very hands-on in putting together a success plan, which is mapping out the methodology for customers to be able to go from start to finish with Netskope. It was really important for me to get something like that created because we saw from customers that there was a need. They wanted to be able to see from a big picture, what they have in their security stack and what’s missing, showing what Netskope can accomplish with our use cases. So it’s exciting that I was actually able to have a say in changing that, whereas in other roles I felt like a small voice in companies that already had its processes and procedures created from many years of doing business. I think the takeaway is that, as I said before, we’re very collaborative in regards to the ideas that people can put forward and they really are listened to and taken note of. I think that’s probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had.
What’s one thing on your bucket list that you’d like to check off?
I guess it would be to be able to travel again to another country and go on a holiday. Being locked down gives you a different perspective on things you took for granted. I don’t have one country that I’m super keen to go to yet, though I do want to see the Northern Lights which I’ve never seen before. There are only a few countries where you can see them. You can camp underneath the stars in Norway or you can see them from Canada or Alaska as well. I want to be able to stay in one of those igloos where you can look up and just watch the Northern Lights from inside.
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