How Kaseya’s New Chief Customer Officer Plans To Rebuild Trust With MSPs: Exclusive

‘I’m here to listen. I’m here to learn. I’m here to help Kaseya become even a stronger business partner, and we’re going to measure our success by the outcomes they achieve, not simply by the activities that we do. I want to understand their business. I want to respond with ownership and I want to help them become more productive, more resilient and more successful,’ says Ketan Tailor, Kaseya’s new chief customer officer.

Kaseya’s new chief customer officer, Ketan Tailor, says he wants to rebuild trust with the company’s MSP partners, shifting their relationship with the Miami-based vendor away from a transactional experience toward a more collaborative partnership.

That means making the customer experience more consistent, addressing longstanding frustrations around support, billing and product integration, and getting ahead of partner problems rather than simply responding when something goes wrong, Tailor told CRN in an exclusive interview.

“The biggest thing that I want to do is make sure that they have a seamless experience and understand that we are there to help them,” he said. “I want them to feel like Kaseya is a partner, a true partner and not just a vendor. That, to me, is the key for us to build really trusting relationships with our partner base, and that’s what I want to be focused on.”

Tailor, who started the job last week, brings more than 20 years of leadership experience across customer success, technical support, professional services and customer experience transformation. Before joining Kaseya, he served as chief customer officer at Barracuda with previous positions at Ping Identity, xMatters, Everbridge and Sophos.

In his role at Kaseya, the goal is to make partner interactions more proactive to ultimately help MSPs operate more efficiently, follow best practices and improve their businesses.

“If they’re successful, that’s what makes Kaseya successful,” he said. “It’s a little bit of a different lens than past organizations I’ve been at, where we’re just selling a product. We actually have a direct impact on the business itself.”

Another challenge Tailor plans to address is the fragmented partner experience that can occur following acquisitions. Kaseya’s customer base includes both legacy Kaseya customers and Datto customers following its 2022 acquisition of Datto. Those groups may have different expectations. To address that, he looks to establish a unified customer journey regardless of a partner’s history with the company or the products it uses.

“Your onboarding experience, let’s start with that. What does that look like for you? Doesn’t matter if you were a Datto customer or if you were a Kaseya customer, the experience you have with us should be the same,” he said. “It should be unified. It shouldn’t be two different tracks that you’re going off of.”

Tim Guim, CEO of New Jersey-based Kaseya partner PCH Technologies, said he’s looking forward to Tailor restoring a stronger sense of partnership by returning to a more collaborative approach.

“It would be nice to get back to a partnership,” Guim told CRN. “Working with Kaseya at some points was a little bit more transactional, but to have a deeper relationship, understand the issues that we’re having with our clients and for Kaseya to be more understanding from that perspective would be helpful.”

He pointed to Datto’s former approach to working with MSPs as an example of the kind of partner relationships he would like to see Kaseya reestablish.

“Bringing back some of those things and those ideas would be very helpful, I think, to bring back to the MSP partners,” he said. “Especially the ones that have been around for a while, the longer-term partners.”

Tailor acknowledged partner challenges raised in the past around support, billing and product integration. “I think we’ve already made some improvements in those areas. I think there is still some more work to do,” he said. “I’m going to double down on that. Those are things that I’m going to raise as I hear and as I collect a lot of this data, as I talk to more and more partners.”

His immediate priority, however, is listening. Over his first 100 days, he plans to meet partners through conferences, calls and in-person meetings. And he wants to establish a more formal voice-of-the-customer program that captures feedback across different partner segments.

“I’m here to listen. I’m here to learn. I’m here to help Kaseya become even a stronger business partner, and we’re going to measure our success by the outcomes they achieve, not simply by the activities that we do,” he said. “I want to understand their business. I want to respond with ownership and I want to help them become more productive, more resilient and more successful.”