In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, Customer Experience (CX) has quickly become the ultimate differentiator — and few leaders embody this evolution better than Srikrishnan Ganesan, the Co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane. With a career deeply rooted in building and scaling SaaS startups, Sri brings a rare blend of product mastery and CX obsession to every venture he leads.
Before launching Rocketlane, Sri co-founded Konotor, a mobile-first user engagement platform that was later acquired by Freshworks in 2015. That technological foundation became what is known today as Freshchat, a tool that reshaped how brands converse with customers at scale. But Sri’s journey didn’t stop there — it evolved into a new vision: creating a purpose-built platform that would revolutionize how teams deliver predictable outcomes and exceed client expectations right from onboarding.
Enter Rocketlane — a cutting-edge Professional Services Automation (PSA) and client onboarding platform that unifies projects, resources, finances, and customer collaboration into one seamless experience. Rocketlane gives service teams the power to achieve unmatched efficiency, time-to-value, and delivery excellence — while ensuring clients remain at the center of the journey.
In this exclusive conversation with CX Quest, Sri shares his perspective on where CX is headed — diving into the nuanced roles of agentic AI, trust-building, and organizational agility in shaping next-generation customer experiences.
Welcome, Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane
Q1. Sri, welcome to CX Quest! Before we dive in, could you tell us how the idea of Rocketlane came to life — and how your earlier work with Konotor and Freshchat helped shape its foundations?
SG: Rocketlane grew out of a very specific, recurring frustration we kept seeing across SaaS companies. Customers were buying strong products, but onboarding and implementation—the first real experience of the partnership and the path to value—were often slow, fragmented, and chaotic.
We realized that onboarding is the first experience customers have of how reliably promises translate into action. So, we set out to build something that treats onboarding as a first-class experience and with the same rigor and intentionality as product design.
Before building anything, we spent months talking to practitioners. We conducted over 80 interviews, clocking more than 200 hours of recorded calls. We asked people to show us how onboarding actually worked. What we saw was consistent: teams rebuilding spreadsheets for every customer, deal context scattered across tools, and delivery teams doing double the work just to keep internal tracking and customer-facing plans in sync.
So, we focused on one clear job-to-be-done: create a single space where customers and implementation teams work together. Teams retain control over what internal complexity to expose, while best practices are embedded into the flow of work.
Our experience building Konotor taught us that visibility for customers and simplicity for teams are non-negotiable. This translated into two foundational principles: treat the customer as a collaborator, and bake the playbook into the product so best practices are a part of the workflow.
What are the Common Gaps in CX?
Q2. Rocketlane has positioned itself as a unified platform for onboarding and professional services teams. What common gaps in CX did you see that led to building such an integrated solution?
SG: We saw that the customer experience (CX) gaps were largely structural.
Most teams were operating with fragmented systems—customer updates, feedback, and approvals handled in email or survey tools, project plans in one place, and internal coordination and work context spread across documents, spreadsheets, and chat. From the customer’s perspective, progress was hard to interpret. They didn’t know what was happening, what was expected of them, or when they’d actually start seeing value.
The second gap was around ownership. Onboarding sat in this awkward space between sales and post-sale delivery, spanning services and support. Teams were managing tasks and checking boxes while customers were just trying to understand if things were actually moving forward. That mismatch created friction, delays, and unnecessary escalations—even when teams were doing solid work.
The third gap was what I’d call a playbook gap. Best practices lived in people’s heads or in static documents somewhere. As teams scaled, heroes were needed everywhere, and consistency broke down fast.
We wanted Rocketlane to close those gaps by building a shared operating layer where process discipline, collaboration, and customer visibility come together naturally.
What are the Consistent Lessons About CX that Apply Universally?
Q3. Over the years, you’ve worked with several fast-scaling SaaS companies. What consistent lessons have you learned about CX that apply regardless of industry or business stage?
SG: Here’s what surprised me early on—customers are far more tolerant of complexity than teams expect—as long as they can see what’s happening, understand why it’s happening, and know what’s expected of them next.
Second, CX breaks down fastest at handoffs. The transition from sales to onboarding, onboarding to steady state, or implementation to support is where context and accountability are most often lost. We’ve watched scaling companies optimize each function independently, and it makes sense internally. But customers experience the system as a whole. Unless there’s a shared operating layer carrying intent, commitments, and success criteria across teams, the experience just doesn’t work for customers.
Third — and this is counterintuitive for a lot of teams — consistency beats customization. Early on, you win customers by being flexible and responsive. But as volume increases, you need well-designed defaults that teams can adapt consciously.
In fact, even your largest customers want to hear your perspective on how to best accomplish their goals—they’re looking for your expertise and proven practices. That requires codifying playbooks, success milestones, and communication patterns, and embedding them into the daily flow of work.
How the Definition of ‘Customer Success’ Evolved in Recent Years?
Q4. In your view, how has the definition of “customer success” evolved in recent years — especially as clients demand more transparency, speed, and measurable impact?
SG: Customer success has moved from a relationship-centric function to an execution-centric one.
Earlier, success was often defined by relationship health, responsiveness, renewal management, or what we could call the softer metrics. Those things still matter, obviously, but they are also expected to speak the language of business metrics—ROI, efficiency gains, revenue influence.
Today, customers expect CS teams to be accountable for outcomes, not just satisfaction.
At Rocketlane, we’ve created a dedicated Customer Outcome Architect (COA) team, explicitly focused on driving execution and measurable results.
That includes demonstrating time-to-value, tracking adoption against real business objectives, and showing progress in ways that hold up at the executive level.
When it comes to transparency, customers don’t want periodic status updates anymore—they want continuous visibility into what’s happening, what’s blocked, and what value has been realized so far. CS teams are being pulled closer to shared execution environments where plans, milestones, and risks are explicit and always current.
How Can Agentic AI Deliver Better?
Q5. Let’s talk technology and trust. How is Rocketlane leveraging agentic AI to deliver more personalized onboarding experiences while maintaining transparency and customer confidence?
SG: We think about agentic AI primarily as a way to strengthen execution discipline, not as something customers need to interact with directly. Customers don’t need to “see” AI to benefit from it.
Every onboarding team needs to go through three levels of transformation with AI: operational, delivery, and work execution. The last two directly impact what customers experience.
At the delivery level, agents help teams detect and manage signals that are easy to miss at scale—early risk indicators, stalled milestones, unresolved dependencies, or misaligned expectations. They support routine project management work such as maintaining RAID logs, flagging deviations, and drafting structured updates, which helps teams intervene earlier and communicate more consistently. This happens behind the scenes—customers don’t see the internal mechanics.
At the work execution level, agents handle portions of the delivery work—generating documentation, assisting with configuration, handling migrations, and supporting data transformations. Teams still own decisions and outcomes, but timelines are shorter, and quality is more consistent.
How to Balance Automation with Human Touch?
Q6. Every new technology introduces new challenges. When implementing AI-driven features, what were some of the real-world challenges Rocketlane faced in balancing automation with human touch?
SG: Great question. It’s been an interesting challenge to design a UX that makes it easy for humans to add context to AI-generated work. AI can produce output quickly, but it still needs the right context and pointers to be useful.
For example, our documentation agents let reps share their own notes or key pointers before the agent generates a document. This ensures reps capture the context and priorities that matter, even if it’s just quick notes. The AI then works from that foundation.
More broadly, we’ve leaned into human-in-the-loop patterns to ensure humans review AI work output before it goes anywhere. The focus is on getting that scaffolding piece right so people can build internal trust and continue to exercise their judgment.
How Does Transparency Influence CX?
Q7. Trust is becoming central to every CX conversation. How do you see transparency influencing the long-term relationship between customers and service teams?
SG: When you work closely with professional services and post-sale leaders, you realize that trust develops when you have a shared reality.
And transparency is the only way to build that. Historically, service teams carried all the context: the plans, the risks, the internal debates, the trade-offs you’re constantly making. Customers only saw the polished version. That imbalance might feel safer in the short term, especially for delivery teams who don’t want to alarm customers. But over time, it weakens trust.
What transparency really does is invite customers into the execution system itself. Then, they stop evaluating you purely on outcomes and start valuing decision quality along the way. This creates endurance in relationships. When things go off-track—and in complex implementations, they always do at some point—customers don’t feel misled or blindsided.
That difference determines how a relationship matures under pressure.
There’s also a long-term internal effect. Transparency raises the bar for how service organizations operate. Teams are forced to be more rigorous about scope, sequencing, and ownership because clarity becomes the standard. Over time, this raises the maturity of professional services itself.
How to Become More Agile and Resilient?
Q8. Adaptability is often the backbone of successful CX. How does Rocketlane’s platform help organizations become more agile and resilient in adjusting to dynamic client expectations?
SG: Most professional services teams struggle with adaptability because their systems are fragile.
Rocketlane helps teams become more agile by turning implementation and services into a living system rather than a fixed plan. When scope changes, dependencies shift, or priorities are reprioritized, those changes are reflected immediately in shared plans, timelines, and ownership—internally and for the customer.
Decisions get made faster because the impact of those decisions is clear. Rocketlane surfaces risks, stalled milestones, and overloaded teams early, so leaders can intervene before issues compound.
What I consistently see is that the most “adaptable” teams aren’t the most flexible in an ad-hoc sense. They’re the most disciplined. They have clear execution models, shared visibility, and systems that support change as a normal condition. Rocketlane is designed to build that kind of informed, confident adaptability.
How Predictability Enhances Overall Customer Experience?
Q9. You’ve spoken before about creating “predictable delivery outcomes.” Can you elaborate on how predictability enhances the overall customer experience from both a client and business standpoint?
SG: When I talk about predictable delivery outcomes, I’m not talking about rigidity or over-engineering every touchpoint. Predictability doesn’t mean nothing ever goes wrong.
It means customers trust they won’t be surprised or kept in the dark.
They want confidence that what was promised will happen roughly the way it was described, and that deviations will be surfaced early enough to matter—and that there’s a plan when things don’t go as expected. That sense of control is a huge part of good CX.
In predictable systems, problems feel like manageable exceptions. They seem visible and contained. In unpredictable ones, customers don’t know whether they’re seeing an isolated hiccup or a symptom of a deeper problem.
The most important nuance is this: predictability actually creates room for flexibility. When your core delivery model is reliable and proven, your internal teams can adapt intelligently when customer needs change or evolve.
How to Shape the Next Wave of Enterprise Service Delivery?
Q10. Finally, looking ahead — how do you envision AI, data ethics, and human-centric CX intersecting to shape the next wave of enterprise service delivery? What advice would you give to leaders seeking to prepare for that future?
SG: Looking ahead, I think AI will change how enterprise teams understand and shape customer experience over time.
In complex service work, experience shifts gradually as expectations evolve, engagement patterns change, and small execution issues add up. AI helps by connecting signals across plans, conversations, and delivery work, giving teams a clearer sense of where an engagement is heading.
That kind of visibility changes how teams respond. When risks show up earlier, there’s more room to have useful conversations and make adjustments. Data ethics then becomes practical. Customers need to understand why something is being flagged and who is responsible for acting on it. That clarity matters more than the sophistication of the system itself.
For leaders preparing for this shift, the priority is foundational work. Build clear delivery models before layering in intelligence. Make trajectory health visible across the customer lifecycle. Things like expectation alignment, engagement quality, and decision speed over time often tell you more than any single score or survey.
Finally, measure success in terms of confidence, not speed alone. Customers don’t want “AI-driven services”; they want confidence that someone is paying attention, making trade-offs consciously, and taking responsibility when things don’t go to plan.
Exceptional Customer Experience isn’t About Isolated Improvements
As this conversation with Srikrishnan Ganesan reveals, the journey toward exceptional customer experience isn’t about isolated improvements — it’s about orchestrated evolution. Through Rocketlane, Sri and his team have built more than just a product; they’ve created a CX powerhouse that redefines collaboration, predictability, and trust in client relationships.
What stands out most is Rocketlane’s commitment to balancing automation with empathy. The focus on agentic AI, radical transparency, and operational agility demonstrates how technology, when designed with clarity of purpose, can deepen trust rather than dilute it.
In a future where customers expect seamless, transparent, and humanized experiences, leaders like Srikrishnan Ganesan prove that success comes not from chasing trends, but from building systems that serve people better — consistently, intelligently, and authentically.
