Nextdoor’s Krish Sailam: Driving Community Engagement Through Localization at Scale

Builders Wanted

This episode features an interview with Krish Sailam, Marketing Technology & Operations Lead at Nextdoor. After spending 20 years in the AdTech and MarTech space, he now helps brands craft their experiences from a customer-centric perspective. Prior to Nextdoor, Krish served IPG and Dentsu where he managed large programmatic accounts for Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, Slack, and Intel.

In this episode, Kailey and Krish discuss driving community engagement through localization at scale, creating customer-centric user journeys, and escaping the data cesspool.

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Key Takeaways:

• Designing your user experience based on what the customer wants instead of what the latest innovative technology can do will help you drive retention of relationships and revenue. Customers are looking for experiences that feel natural and intuitive to them.
• As technology continues to revolutionize data, it’s important to shift the balance of the customer experience into the hands of AI to streamline that process. Ensure you have knowledgeable people in your organization and restructure your data systems so they are built for AI.
• Don’t be afraid to kill off your systems. With all of these new developments in AI and data, it pays to be adaptable. By practicing “data Pilates,” you’re creating systems that have a strong core, but are flexible and sustainable.

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“Don’t be afraid to kill off your systems, in the spirit of AI coming down the pipe and needing to rebuild these things. The way I see it is, you really need to practice this concept of data Pilates or data yoga. Come up with a really strong core, but make sure it's really flexible and it's able to do a lot of things.” – Krish Sailam

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Episode Timestamps:

‍*(02:20) - Krish’s career journey

*(07:16) - Krish explains Nextdoor

*(10:10) - Industry trends in customer engagement in tech

*(20:41) - Changes in customer behavior in tech

*(26:41) - Challenges in the customer engagement journey

*(29:24) - How Krish defines “good data”

*(39:04) - A time Krish was surprised by data

*(42:15) - Changes in customer engagement in the next 6-12 months

‍*(45:26) - An example of another company doing it right with customer engagement (hint: it’s Little Spoon and Spotify)

*(48:08) - Krish’s recommendations for upleveling customer engagement

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Links:

Connect with Krish on LinkedIn

Connect with Kailey on LinkedIn

Learn more about Caspian Studios

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