Our Story!

Hi there, we are glad you dropped in to read up a little more about us. Let’s get you a bit more familiar with who we are, what we do and why.

CEMT Enterprises was co-founded by Chetan and Ekata Pradhan. 19 years of marriage and 2 active boys later we are now embarking on our venture to bring the "service" aspect back to the customer support function of business. We think businesses have let that slide for quite sometime now and are only now beginning to realize what all is at stake. We have seen our fair share of dos and don'ts in the service industry while being employed with some of the top notch IT companies around the Bay Area. Outside of work we go with the flow and love traveling, biking, movies and making each other laugh. The entire clan has a funny bone and thank god for humor in our lives!!

Chetan "The" Guy :)

I have worked in various tech companies in Silicon Valley for 24 years. Started right out of college as an eager-to-learn junior Technical Support Analyst at VideoSoft, a small startup. Coming from a technical background, this was a good introduction to customer service, and I started learning invaluable soft skills on the job. After a couple of years, I moved to a larger corporate company called Siebel which was later acquired by Oracle, an even larger company.

I was at Siebel/Oracle for more than 8 years where I moved up the roles of Technical Support Engineer, then Support Team Lead to Technical Support Manager. In the role, I managed a global support team that included teams from the West Coast, East Coast and Brazil. This helped me expand my management and leadership skills in leading a diverse team that spread across North and Latin America.

With this rich experience, I decided to further my experience in customer support at other companies. After various stints at startups and other medium sized businesses, I ended up joining a leading-edge company called VMware as a Support Manager and advanced to a Senior Support Manager for more than 8 years. It was in this role that I truly matured my experience on the customer service side of things. I already had a strong technical team and now my role focused on how to get them oriented to deliver high levels of customer service while providing technical solutions.

Furthermore, I had the opportunity to consolidate and manage a remote offshore support team in India and then help build a new nearshore support team in Costa Rica. There were lots of lessons learned around team building and growth.

Throughout my professional career, I amassed experience in diverse settings - from managing a 3 person team at Questra where you were "it" - burning software onto CDs (in those days), packaging, shipping and supporting the clients, to managing a global team of around a hundred team members at VMware.

While I started out in a technical role, my career path evolved into more customer centric roles. Accordingly, I was able to gain a well-rounded experience in the customer support and customer service industry. (Stay tuned for more on the differences between customer support and customer service in a future blog).

Ekata "The" Gal ;)

After my undergraduate degree in business, I joined Mary Kay selling cosmetics and beauty products. I had the opportunity to learn the art of selling and the importance of customer service. Designed by destiny, I ended up joining Siebel while Chetan was still employed there, so CEMT is not the first time we are working together :). I then went on to obtain my MBA in business entrepreneurship while maintaining my full-time job in parallel. Thinking back, I’m not quite sure how I did it but like I keep telling myself - there's always a method to the madness! More fittingly in the words of Virginia Woolf "Arrange whatever pieces come your way."

My primary role at Siebel was to provide customer service to Siebel customers. I was able to develop my skills and experience in customer service as the company had a large customer base that presented with a variety of challenges daily. I was handling both direct phone calls and web tickets from global customers on issues related to onboarding and setting up new customers, licensing and entitlements, shipping and questions related to patches and releases.

When Siebel was acquired after 4 years, I stayed on with Oracle where I worked my way up to higher roles which meant that I would be doing more of the above duties at a much deeper level. It included handling customer escalations independently, training teams and contributing to the global team based on my years of experience. Furthermore, I was able to interact with leads and senior members of other technical and customer service teams globally. As my roles expanded, I also refined my skills in areas like written communications, knowledgebase content creation and team leadership roles.

In the last couple of years before leaving Oracle, I transitioned to the health sciences team where I gained familiarity with the Life Sciences industry. I was part of the service team that handled issues related to clinical trials speaking to customers many of whom were doctors, research coordinators, project managers and site monitors. This exposed me to yet another booming industry of healthcare where customer service has been gaining grounds amid the rapid developments and ongoing competition.

The several years of experience I gathered at these organizations has helped garner the customer service professional I am today. I have a deeper understanding of the various layers involved in delivering superior levels of customer service and hopefully I will be able to contribute all my learnings at CEMT.