E82 - Mladen Milanovic at Presidio

Our Head of Enterprise USA Harry Green was joined by Mladen Milanovic, the Vice President of Engineering at Presidio. Mladen and Harry discuss a wide breadth of topics such as his perspective on remote working and how the cloud space is affecting contact centres.

After he finished his master’s degree back in 2001, he never imagined he would be in the traditional IT industry. He spent most of his time during his education learning how to be an electronic engineer.

He got his first taste of Networking at a small company where he was able to start getting his certifications. For him, gaining certs would give him an additional ability to be recognised in the market. At that time, IP telephony started developing so he jumped onto that bandwagon and then from there jumped into the contact centre where he stayed for 16 years.

A huge part of his role is tracking the KPIs of his team, making sure they deliver for their customers and the business as a whole. If you do not look at the numbers and reports, you can successfully set a direction for your team. It gives you the opportunity to set a pathway to see the bigger picture.

Since the pandemic, it has changed the way businesses work and operate. With this new working-from-home model, how has Mladen managed his team? Surprisingly, it hasn’t affected him at all. He has been part of a virtual team for the last 4 years and has had his home office for as long as he can remember. He manages engineers from Portland to Louisiana and none of them has come to the office for that time and that was before Covid, so it was like second nature to him.

As you are moving up in the business world, or in your life in general, Mladen has come to realise that relationships are everything. Always try to take care of people without thinking you will get something in return. You will find that these build trust with every person you cross paths with.

Trends in Contact Centre…

Contact Centre has been in huge disruption the past couple of years, and this is down to the Cloud. The customer experience is always changing, and the Contact Centre industry has to be agile in order to keep up with the speed of those changes. Cloud provides much more power to the end user and allows them to keep innovating, which gives them more creativity in terms of what they can do with their customer experience. As much as it’s been a disruptor, it’s always a huge positive. It allows their customers to try it before they deploy it, a try before you buy if you will.

When he was starting out, he’d have to put in between $2-3k at the very least to build a lab in his home. Nowadays, if you wanted to move into the cloud, you just need a credit card. You can put it in a cloud provider in which they provide 300-400 dollars free. So you would be making a small investment to get the opportunity to start playing with systems big vendors are using.

Mladen shares the non-negotiables he looks for when hiring and a brilliant book recommendation in our quick-fire round. Listen to the full episode now to hear it!