Meet RingCentral’s New Chief Product Officer, Srinivasan Raghavan | #customersupport #supporticket

Highlights:

• Srinivasan plans to enhance user experience, improve user productivity and provide reliable communications for RingCentral’s users by leveraging AI
  
• Srinivasan believes that empathy is at the core of strong leadership

Why RingCentral?

We sat down with Srinivasan (Srini) Raghavan, RingCentral’s new Chief Product Officer (CPO) who joined from Five9 and prior to that was at Cisco on the Collaboration team, to understand why he decided to join RingCentral and his vision for our enhancing our platform and products.

“The most exciting aspect of joining RingCentral is the opportunity to innovate and build the future of communication and collaboration for industries and businesses of all sizes. My team’s goal is to provide delightful experiences to our users by providing reliable communications and improving productivity,” Srini says. 

“RingCentral is constantly impacting the lives of our users across businesses of all sizes. Innovating at scale and empowering frictionless communication and collaboration  for millions of users is a very meaningful journey to be on.”

AI advancements enable delightful human interactions

AI is the next biggest step change we are having after Cloud and Mobility in the last 25 years.  So, we asked Srini about the most pressing areas of communication that AI can help improve. Srini sees three distinct ways that our newly launched AI Platform, RingSense, can improve the experience for our users:

1. 1. Intelligent Business Concierge. Imagine a personalized concierge that can help businesses with making more efficient sales, marketing & customer service. This is possible by leveraging a combination of our RingSense platform and using pre-trained Large Language models such as ChatGPT. We are very excited by the range of possibilities that we can unlock here soon!,” Srini says.
   2. Seamless Interactions. RingCentral users can focus on having interactions rather than taking notes, action items etc. Our Video product offers meeting insights which already leverages capabilities from our RIngSense platform to offer Meeting Insights and you will see more rapid innovations coming up on our other products such as Phone, Messaging and Contact Center.
   3. Getting Intelligence from Real Time communications. Our recently launched product, RingSense for Sales, provides the superpowers of AI to sales people to improve sales effectiveness and make everyone a sales superstar! This is just the beginning of how we are going to leverage AI to make communications more intelligent across functions such as Sales, Customer Service etc.”
      
      Srini continues, “Fundamentally, you can improve the productivity and effectiveness of millions of people by adding intelligence to their everyday communications”. By eliminating obstacles in communication, we enable more interactions between people, which in turn powers more innovations. 

Srini’s ultimate goal, his true mission, is to improve communication so that people can interact seamlessly.  “To improve communication, we should strive for greater personalization and intuitiveness. By embracing a more natural approach to how we interact with each other, we can build deeper connections and foster a stronger sense of understanding and empathy,” Srini concludes.

Leading with empathy   

In the first two months at RingCentral, there is one common trait that Srini has noticed about our culture, it’s the passion to do the right thing for our millions of users. The passion from Product, UX and Engineering teams to design and build user-friendly products and from the GTM teams the enthusiasm for serving our customers and partners. As the Chief Product Officer, Srini is tasked with leading a large team and bring to market the product innovations that will help our users, customers and partners. Srini believes great leadership starts with empathy.

“‘Empathy is a very important trait for a leader to possess. Demonstrating empathy involves actively listening to your colleagues, acknowledging their feelings and perspectives, and showing that you care about their well-being. You can also demonstrate empathy by being supportive, offering help or guidance, and showing understanding and patience in challenging situations. Taking the time to learn about different perspectives and experiences will foster very creative innovations.  Empathy also involves being open and honest in your communication, giving constructive feedback, and offering opportunities for growth and development. By demonstrating empathy and creating a supportive work environment, leaders can inspire our colleagues to be their best selves and achieve their full potential. I firmly believe in leading with empathy” 

Srini, welcome to the RingCentral team. Your vision, passion, and empathy add to the vibrance of the RingCentral community. We appreciate your commitment to innovate, impact, and improve the lives of millions of our customers. 

Originally published Apr 04, 2023