Meet Karunn Kandoi, ApplyBoard’s incredible Chief Experience Officer. Karunn works in our Gurugram, India office and has been helping ApplyBoard Educate the World as a Chief Experience Officer since August 2020. In this role, he ensures that ApplyBoard provides the best possible customer experience for our stakeholders. This includes making sure all student applications submitted through ApplyBoard are checked, validated, and submitted to our partner schools as quickly and efficiently as possible. He recently sat down with us for an ApplyBoardian Q&A to talk about his Life at ApplyBoard.
Keep reading and watch the video below to learn about his journey!
How Karunn Supports ApplyBoard’s Mission
Ensuring ApplyBoard upholds our core value of Delivering an A+ Customer Experience is central to Karunn’s work. Ultimately, he believes that “for ApplyBoard to be successful, it is paramount that we provide a seamless, frictionless experience to all of our customers at all points in time.” He shares that delivering this level of customer experience doesn’t stop within the customer experience umbrella; it’s the responsibility of everyone at ApplyBoard. Central to Karunn’s role is ensuring that ApplyBoardians have what they need to make sure every student, recruitment partner, and academic institution we work with are wowed with their ApplyBoard experience.
Challenges Faced and Overcome
Like many ApplyBoardians, Karunn himself is a former international student, which gives him an invaluable perspective he can leverage in his role. He pursued postgraduate studies in the United States, and like anyone studying abroad, he experienced challenges along the way. The biggest was the culture shock of moving to another country. He shares that, coming from a conservative society, he referred to his teachers as sir and ma’am, or by the title of professor, rather than informally by their first name, which is common in America. Karunn says that “it took me a while to come around… and start calling my professors by their first names. And that was an effort.”
The second challenge was the language itself. Although Karunn is an English speaker, he was unfamiliar with the idioms used by his fellow students and professors in day-to-day conversation.
Note: Idioms are phrases or expressions with a unique, non-literal meaning, often rooted in cultural or historical context. Idioms exist across all languages; with many considering French idioms among the world’s best. Common English idioms include being “under the weather” when you feel sick, or saying “break a leg” to wish someone good luck.
Karunn, however, was determined to overcome this roadblock. “The way I overcame that was whenever I heard something I didn’t understand, I would write it down and I would go back and look up its meaning.”
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The Importance of Regular Customer Touchpoints
Karunn emphasizes the importance of ApplyBoard team members meeting regularly with our recruitment partners and partner institutions to ensure we’re delivering an unforgettable customer experience. He says that “there’s always a challenge in perception versus reality. Unless you sit down with the customers, in our case, our partner institutions and recruitment partners, you wouldn’t really know what challenges they’re facing and how to solve [those] for them.”
Karunn goes on to say that some of the products that ApplyBoard is now offering to further ease our students’ journeys, such as loans, Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GICs), and tests, were inspired by conversations with our partners. He shares that “it’s critical that all of us at all time[s] are in touch with our partners, learning from them and improving.”
In an era where email and messaging tools like Slack or Google Chat are often the predominant style of communication, Karunn’s insights on the impact of face-to-face meetings are important. So, remember, scheduling in-person meetings with your stakeholders will not only help you to build trust, but you may also uncover valuable insights.
In the three years since joining ApplyBoard, Karunn has dedicated himself to ensuring the best possible experience for all our stakeholders. His commitment to providing seamless customer experiences resonates throughout ApplyBoard. Thank you, Karunn, for everything you do to help ApplyBoard grow, and your unwavering dedication to our work to Educate the World. We’re so lucky to have you!
Interested in joining ApplyBoard? Take a peek at our open roles on the ApplyBoard Careers page!
