Bangalore

Nandini was part of the founding team at Urban Ladder, from May 2012. She led the customer service function at Urban Ladder for over 3 years. Her goal was to ensure that every Urban Ladder customer was happy at the end of the interaction.

She started her career at Google India working with the AdWords Team right after her Masters' in Linguistics at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. She went to pursue a Master's Degree specializing in New Media Management from the Newhouse School of Communications, Syracuse University. Prior to Urban Ladder, Nandini was part of a small startup, Latitude Marketing where she worked with their Business Development Team.

Nandini leads the Customer Experience function at Urban Ladder currently and is deeply involved in optimizing the customer experience across all touch points and delighting customers in all ways possible.

Nitesh Chetri is Vice President, Customer Experience at Lenskart.com. Nitesh is responsible for leading and improving an Omni Channel customer experience at Lenskart.

Lenskart.com is one of the largest eyewear companies in India with an equal presence online, through brick and mortar stores and home eye check ups. Lenskart.com has more than 150+ stores across the country. Lenskart’s aim is to provide high quality eyewear to millions of Indians and revolutionize the eyewear industry in India.

Nitesh is responsible for driving superlative experience for consumers by using technology and moving towards driving a continuity of experience across all retail channels.

Prior to joining Lenskart.com, Nitesh was with Flipkart.com as Director - Customer Service and spent close to 10 years at American Express with his last role there as Director, Operations – Customer Fulfilment Network.

He has a PGDM from the Management Development Institute, Gurgaon.

A Mechanical Engineer with an MBA from IIM Calcutta, KBN, as he is popularly known, has 30 years of rich experience in Hi-tech, Automotive, Logistics and E-commerce sectors.

Currently as CEO at Big Basket, he takes care of all Customer facing functions like customer delivery, customer service and web experience. Big Basket is the largest e-commerce company in the grocery space with a presence in 9 metro cities and 20 Tier 2 cities with over 12000 employees.

His earlier assignments included senior management positions at TVS Logistics Services, Lenovo India, Schenker India and Hewlett Packard India.

He took a sabbatical during 2012-13, when he taught Supply Chain Management, consulted with a healthcare company and advised an e-commerce start-up and an NGO. During this period, he also assisted his wife in developing an organic vegetable garden in urban Bangalore.

Shradha Sharma is the Founder and Chief Editor of YourStory. Shradha lives her life in stories and believes that every story is unique and every story matters. She holds degrees from St. Stephens College, Delhi and MICA, Ahmedabad and prior to founding YourStory, Shradha worked with Times of India and CNBC TV18. In 2015, she was selected in the list of 500 LinkedIn Influencers across the world, and received the L’Oreal Paris Femina Award for Online Influence. Most recently, she was named as one of the Fortune 40 under 40.

Thejaswi Udupa heads product and technology at Buildkar.com. His current job involves attempting to break cartels in the building materials industry, which he hopes to do with a few lines of code and top notch customer service, the kind this industry has never expected or experienced.

He previously was with Yahoo for nearly eight years, a good chunk of it with the Yahoo Sports team, looking after product management for international sports.

He holds strong opinions on books, music, and what constitutes the boundaries of Bangalore and can be seen or heard pontificating on these topics fairly often.

Ritu has spent 11 years in risk mitigation and crisis management, big data and digital content. Her strong understanding of human behaviour and social networks has led to her working with organisations like the CIA, Deutsche Bank and Ted.

She recently moved to India and is the founder of The Data Duck - a firm that enables its partners mine opportunities. The Data Duck has a simple philosophy - When You Grow, We Grow.

"Companies often feel anxious about the downside risk of Social Media and constrain their optimization of this medium. Companies that respond well to crisis can actually grow their communities and gain market share. It all boils down to preparedness."

Sriram leads Customer Connect Operations at Myntra and drives cross-functional initiatives to improve Customer Experience across touch-points. His past experience includes working with banks and Financial Services organizations globally to develop multi-channel customer management strategies and execute initiatives to improve Customer Experience, streamline operating models and enhance service maturity.

Sriram is passionate about initiatives and experiments that could help improve organizations' understanding of customer expectations, value perceptions and experience in the consumer internet space. He graduated from BITS, Pilani, and followed it up with an MBA from IIM, Lucknow.

Yaquta Mandviwala is a partner in Bain & Company's Mumbai office. She leads Bain India's Customer Strategy & Marketing practice.

She has more than 10 years of management consulting experience throughout India, Europe and Africa. Her work is focused on helping companies make decisions in the areas of corporate and business strategy, innovation, organization, sales and marketing and private equity deals.

Yaquta has led multi-year engagements working along with the leadership teams in some of the largest businesses in India, driving change on the ground and delivering results. She is passionate about driving customer-led growth and a customer oriented culture in organizations. The clients she has worked with come from the retail, auto, real estate, healthcare, financial services, industrial goods and services, technology and private equity sectors.

Diksha started her career with Front Office operations handling Reservations & Revenue with Trident, Gurgaon. She completed her post graduation in Guest Service Management from the Oberoi Centre for Learning and Development in 2007 and moved to Food and Beverage Management. She has worked with Oberoi hotels for ten years, and was part of the opening teams of the two most successful hotels in India - Trident Gurgaon and The Oberoi, Gurgaon.

She has two years of rich experience with Yum Restaurants India, leading Operations Innovation for Pizza Hut India. She leads a diverse portfolio of restaurants, clubs and hospitality establishments. She manages a team of over 1500 members across various levels. Her key responsibilities include the overall health of the business to deliver the financial as well as operational goals in an environment that fosters growth for all.

Suhail comes from a hospitality background, having completed his hotel management from the IHM in Mumbai. He has spent over 6 years with ITC Hotels. His experience was rooted deep in operations and stretched across opening hotels including the ITC Gardenia in Bangalore, to running the convention sales and operations at the ITC Maratha in Mumbai. Having developed a good understanding of customer management and retention, in February 2015, he made the switch to UrbanClap, to set up their Customer Experience team. Apart from heading Customer Experience, Suhail is also responsible for Brand, PR and Partnerships at UrbanClap.

Ashwin Krishna heads Marketing at Capillary Technologies, a pioneer of Omni-channel Engagement and Commerce in Asia. He loves all things Digital, Mobile and Retail!

Ashwin has 11 years of professional and entrepreneurial experience across APAC, Middle East & African markets. In his previous avatar, he has held leadership roles at MartJack, Indiaplaza (India's first eCommerce marketplace) and VConnect (Africa's largest local commerce company). Way back in 2008, he founded HomestayIQ, which was then India's largest aggregator for homestays. He has authored 'It's Commerce Sense', a handbook on Omni-channel Commerce.

A engineer turned marketer by choice, Ashwin holds an MBA from Indian School of Business (Hyderabad), executive MBA from IIM Calcutta and Bachelor of Engineering from NIE, Mysore.

Vinod has worked in a variety of challenging environments starting from the Merchant Navy, a high-energy Mobile-first Financial Technology startup where he headed Strategy and Global Sales to present day, where he is the Co-founder and CEO of CloudCherry, a tech startup which gives you highly actionable analytics and insight to customer facing businesses in real-time.

Cloudcherry's aim is to change the way brands engage with customers, make a lot of market research obsolete and tell businesses the causative drivers for customer retention, loyalty and recurrence. He specializes in identifying and negotiating strategic partnerships, building stellar teams and selling high value products.

Nandan Reddy is an alumnus of BITS Pilani and has worked in business consultancy with organizations such as Intellecap, IDinsight.

Prior to founding Swiggy, he was a founding partner in Zuma, a restaurant in Hyderabad, which was voted as one of the top 10 restaurants for biryni and haleem in Hyderabad by TOI.

He later went on to found Galla, a cloud based tablet point of sale systems for restaurants to help manage billing and inventory, aimed primarily at small and medium restaurants.

A foodie at heart, along with Sriharsha Majety and Rahul Jaimini, he cofounded Swiggy in 2013 and has been ensuring operational efficiency at Swiggy ever since.

Kamal Hingorani currently serves as Senior Vice President & Head, InFlight Services and Customer Experience at SpiceJet. He heads the InFlight department, Center of Excellence (InFlight Training) and Customer Experience, the last one entailing all physical customer touch points across SpiceJet network.

Prior to this, Kamal has served at SpiceJet for seven years, in varied roles – SVP & Head Ground and Airport Services for 3 years and SVP & Head Global Sales, VP Marketing & Planning for 4 years.

With over 30 years of experience in the aviation and travel industry, in areas as diverse as Operations, Sales, Marketing, Strategy and Network Management, he has held leadership positions with international airlines such as SriLankan Airlines, Kuwait Airways and Gulf Air, besides multinational travel companies like Kuoni and ITC Travel House.

Kamal studied Executive General Management at IIM Bangalore. He did his Post Graduation in Business Management, and is a Science Honors graduate from Delhi University.

As COO, Nishant is responsible for scaling and transforming Freshdesk into a global SaaS powerhouse. He oversees all non-R&D aspects of Freshdesk's operations, which includes channel sales, customer success, facilities, finance, HR, legal, presales and sales. Before joining Freshdesk, Nishant was Managing Director, LinkedIn India & South Asia, where he played a pivotal role in scaling their team in India. Nishant energizes himself by spending time with his family and his work family (the Freshdesk team) and is an avid sports and movie buff.

Girish is the founder and CEO of Freshdesk, a global leader in customer support software. He has over 16 years of experience in product management and is passionate about building technology products with intuitive user experiences.

Prior to founding Freshdesk, Girish was the VP of Product Management at Zoho Corporation. He was named ‘Startup Entrepreneur of the Year’ by TiE Chennai in 2012, and also won the CII Connect ‘Emerging Star of the Year’ award in 2013 and Infocom CEO of the Year in 2014. He was also named as one of the 40 Under Forty, published by Fortune India in 2015.

In addition, Girish is part of the team behind the NASSCOM Product Council, which works in promoting and nurturing product companies from India. He is also an active member of iSpirt, actively advising the startup community in India about scaling, and building a global product company out of India.

Girish completed his BE in Electrical and Electronics and finished his MBA from the University of Madras. Girish and his wife, Shoba live in Chennai with their two sons. Girish plays tennis regularly, and enjoys watching movies in his free time.