2026 Creative Customer Success Leaders Award

Discover the 25 most creative customer success leaders globally who achieved remarkable results in 2024. This comprehensive list features innovative professionals who transformed challenges into measurable business outcomes, from 75% engagement increases to 17% ARR growth. Learn proven strategies from industry experts across Fortune 500 companies and high-growth SaaS organizations worldwide.

Customer Success professionals continue to be at the forefront of innovation, driving bold ideas and measurable impact in the tech industry. Their ability to unite cross-departmental efforts while pushing customers toward success is unmatched. This year, creativity took center stage with groundbreaking Customer Programs—innovative approaches that delivered real business impact in 2024. These programs transformed challenges into opportunities, driving engagement, scalability, and measurable results that set a new standard for excellence. New this year, we’re proud to introduce the Experts’ Choice category. A panel of industry leaders selected standout stories from the top 20 nominees, recognizing creative, impactful strategies that made a tangible difference for their businesses. These stories earned the prestigious Experts’ Pick badge, a testament to their exceptional innovation and success. We at EverAfter proudly present the "The 2025 Creative Customer Success Leaders Award", celebrating 25 individuals whose bold strategies are shaping the future of Customer Success. Compiled through community votes and inspiring stories, these are the leaders to watch in 2025, listed in no particular order.

⭐️ Nate Alcorn | ZoomInfo

Transforming SMB Onboarding with the ZoomInfo Journey Portal

The challenge

ZoomInfo’s 90-day onboarding framework had been a reliable, high-quality model across all customer segments. As the company scaled, new patterns emerged in the data. SMB customers with simple, fast-moving use cases were not gaining additional value from extended, human-managed journeys. They needed faster access to guidance, clearer steps at key moments, and onboarding that adjusted to their goals. At the same time, the team was supporting onboarding volumes in the tens of thousands each year. Nate Alcorn recognized that the framework itself remained strong, but its down-market expression needed to evolve to match customer expectations and improve operational efficiency. The challenge was to modernize the experience without lowering the quality bar.

The creative solution

Nate led the design of Digital Touch, an onboarding model delivered through the ZoomInfo Journey Portal powered by EverAfter. He rebuilt manual steps into a dynamic, self-guided journey that adapts to each customer’s context. The solution included:

• Personalized onboarding plans driven by product mix, ACV, and user behavior.
• Automated milestone logic, status updates, and real-time sync with Salesforce.
• In-product prompts through Pendo that guide customers at the moment of need.
• Clear visibility into progress, enabling customers to move at their own pace.
• Human expertise reserved for strategic moments where it creates meaningful lift.

This architecture moved ZoomInfo from a high-touch model to a scalable digital journey that still feels structured and supported.

The Outcomes

The first 30 days delivered measurable results:

• 215 customers onboarded through Digital Touch, raising its share of new onboarding to 27% from 10–12%.
• Nearly 50% of customers engaged on day one, with 30% moving past the Kickoff milestone.
• Time to Kickoff decreased from days to hours.
• 250 onboarding-manager hours were redirected to complex enterprise accounts.
• Early customer behavior showed strong completion of technical milestones and consistent momentum across stages.

The program’s success led to the creation of a dedicated CX Digital Program Manager role to scale Nate’s vision across future onboarding segments.

⭐️ Tara Myles & Bernardo Chabert | Zendesk

Accelerating AI Adoption: How Zendesk Turned Complexity into Opportunity

The challenge

As Zendesk rapidly expanded its AI capabilities, Tara Myles and Bernardo recognized a growing gap. Customers were not adopting the new AI-driven features at the pace or depth the team expected, despite their strong potential for ROI and impact. The challenge was not a lack of value, but a barrier of knowledge, confidence, and resources. Tara and Bernardo saw a critical opportunity. If customers could better understand, evaluate, and integrate these AI solutions, they would unlock immediate operational gains and long-term strategic advantage. The initiative needed to elevate customer readiness, empower CSMs with a structured approach, and create a repeatable model that would improve adoption across Zendesk’s broader product suite.

The creative solution

They built a comprehensive adoption framework that combined segmentation, maturity modeling, assessment, and enablement. Key components included:

• Mapping AI features into cohorts based on vertical, operational priorities, and expected value.
• Defining five levels of adoption maturity from Basic to Expert to set clear customer pathways.
• Creating flexible assessments that CSMs could apply across all engagement models.
• Developing the Adoption Maturity Rolodex, a curated library of templates, content modules, and playbooks tailored to customer needs.
• Enabling CSMs through training, mentorship, office hours, and ongoing coaching.
• Integrating programmatic customer signals to help CSMs identify when customers are primed for adoption.
• Advancing future innovation through a GPT-powered assistant designed to automate assessments and generate tailored adoption plans.

Their work established a repeatable and scalable framework that equips teams and customers to activate AI value with confidence.

The Outcomes

Early impact demonstrated the strength of the framework:

• Up to 65% reduction in manual workload for participating customers.
• Up to 85% improvement in agent efficiency.
• Strong customer feedback citing clarity, confidence, and increased value realization.
• Greater CSM confidence and more strategic, consultative customer engagements.

Collectively, these outcomes show how Tara and Bernardo transformed AI adoption into a structured, scalable motion that drives lasting value for Zendesk and its customers.

⭐️ Sara Arecco | Antavo Ltd

Building a Scalable Customer Hub that Boosts Engagement and Efficiency

The challenge

Antavo’s customers relied on multiple sources to find documentation, resources, and meeting materials, which created friction and slowed progress. As customer needs grew and engagements became more complex, Sara Arecco recognized that the team needed a centralized, scalable way to share information and guide customers through key activities. The challenge was to reduce repetitive communication, increase clarity, and provide a structured experience that motivated customers to take action, while still preserving a personalized and high-touch feel. The solution had to elevate customer education without adding operational burden to the CS team.

The creative solution

Sara led the implementation of EverAfter as a unified customer hub that consolidates information, tracks shared tasks, and supports recurring strategic conversations. By integrating the hub with HubSpot, the team ensured the experience remained both dynamic and easy to maintain. The solution included:

• A branded landing page with sub-pages organized by customer needs and topics.
• Easy-access links to key resources such as platform entry points, contract details, and account tools.
• Dedicated sections for product updates, company news, CSM-led discussions, presentations, EBRs, and follow-up tasks.
• A structured library of FAQs and educational articles, including phase-specific content like renewal preparation.
• Automated updates fed from HubSpot to ensure information remained accurate and scalable.

Sara’s design created a single, clear destination that improved navigation, reduced confusion, and empowered customers and CSMs alike.

The Outcomes

The results demonstrate strong and immediate impact:

• Customer sentiment improved by 10% year over year.
• Academy users increased by 26% year over year.
• Customer questions asking where to find information decreased by 100%.
• 22% of customers explicitly praised the new platform and its ease of use.
• Internal feedback averaged 7.7 out of 10, with every team member reporting positive improvements in efficiency and customer interactions.

This initiative strengthened alignment between Antavo and its customers, reduced repetitive communication, increased visibility, and established a scalable foundation for future growth under Sara’s leadership.

⭐️ Sneha Iyer | Observe.AI

First-Mile Intelligence: Accelerating Customer Value by 40%

The challenge

Observe.AI’s onboarding, Customer Success, and Business Value teams worked hard to deliver insights to more than 350 enterprise customers, yet Sneha Iyer began noticing a recurring pattern. Customers completed technical implementation, moved into value discussions, and then discovered that critical data needed for ROI measurement was missing or inconsistent. The root issue was not customer intent or product capability. It was a fragmented first mile. Teams operated in silos, using templates that varied by person, with no shared system of intelligence to guide discovery or ensure data readiness. This created inconsistent outcomes, slow time-to-value, and repeated reinvention across teams. Sneha recognized an opportunity to transform the first mile from a reactive checklist into a unified, intelligence-driven process that empowered every function to operate from the same foundation.

The creative solution

Sneha designed and launched the First-Mile Intelligence Platform, a guided workflow that connects people, process, and data to ensure customers are set up for measurable success. Key components include:

• Customer setup and automated research briefs that consolidate context from contracts, prior engagements, and similar customers.
• A discovery and data readiness checklist mapping each KPI to the exact data attributes required to measure it.
• Workflow triggers that assign tasks to the right teams when gaps are identified.
• An AI enrichment marketplace that surfaces proven enrichments and attributes based on industry patterns.
• A value map and time-to-value projection that predicts how quickly outcomes can be measured based on data completeness.

The platform blended structure with flexibility, acting as a digital co-pilot during discovery and enabling CSMs to lead more consultative, industry-informed conversations.

Sneha designed and launched the First-Mile Intelligence Platform, a guided workflow that connects people, process, and data to ensure customers are set up for measurable success. Key components include:

• Customer setup and automated research briefs that consolidate context from contracts, prior engagements, and similar customers.
• A discovery and data readiness checklist mapping each KPI to the exact data attributes required to measure it.
• Workflow triggers that assign tasks to the right teams when gaps are identified.
• An AI enrichment marketplace that surfaces proven enrichments and attributes based on industry patterns.
• A value map and time-to-value projection that predicts how quickly outcomes can be measured based on data completeness.

The platform blended structure with flexibility, acting as a digital co-pilot during discovery and enabling CSMs to lead more consultative, industry-informed conversations.

The Outcomes

The impact was significant across customer value, operational efficiency, and internal alignment:

• 70% reduction in discovery and data-prep time.
• Reduction from 16–20 weeks to 8–12 weeks from implementation to insight.
• 40% faster time-to-value for customers post-implementation.
• Internal adoption grew from under 20% to more than 70%, covering 80% of the customer base.
• Ramp time for new CS hires decreased from three months to six weeks.

Beyond metrics, the initiative created a cultural shift. CSMs now lead with confidence, guiding customers toward realistic, data-ready KPIs and building credibility early. Onboarding, CS, and value consulting teams now operate from a shared understanding of data readiness, creating consistent outcomes and accelerating measurable ROI. Sneha’s First-Mile Intelligence Platform transformed an operational gap into a scalable, strategic motion that strengthened the entire post-sale journey.

⭐️ Nate Alcorn | ZoomInfo

Transforming SMB Onboarding with the ZoomInfo Journey Portal

The challenge

ZoomInfo’s 90-day onboarding framework had been a reliable, high-quality model across all customer segments. As the company scaled, new patterns emerged in the data. SMB customers with simple, fast-moving use cases were not gaining additional value from extended, human-managed journeys. They needed faster access to guidance, clearer steps at key moments, and onboarding that adjusted to their goals. At the same time, the team was supporting onboarding volumes in the tens of thousands each year. Nate Alcorn recognized that the framework itself remained strong, but its down-market expression needed to evolve to match customer expectations and improve operational efficiency. The challenge was to modernize the experience without lowering the quality bar.

The creative solution

Nate led the design of Digital Touch, an onboarding model delivered through the ZoomInfo Journey Portal powered by EverAfter. He rebuilt manual steps into a dynamic, self-guided journey that adapts to each customer’s context. The solution included:

• Personalized onboarding plans driven by product mix, ACV, and user behavior.
• Automated milestone logic, status updates, and real-time sync with Salesforce.
• In-product prompts through Pendo that guide customers at the moment of need.
• Clear visibility into progress, enabling customers to move at their own pace.
• Human expertise reserved for strategic moments where it creates meaningful lift.

This architecture moved ZoomInfo from a high-touch model to a scalable digital journey that still feels structured and supported.

The Outcomes

The first 30 days delivered measurable results:

• 215 customers onboarded through Digital Touch, raising its share of new onboarding to 27% from 10–12%.
• Nearly 50% of customers engaged on day one, with 30% moving past the Kickoff milestone.
• Time to Kickoff decreased from days to hours.
• 250 onboarding-manager hours were redirected to complex enterprise accounts.
• Early customer behavior showed strong completion of technical milestones and consistent momentum across stages.

The program’s success led to the creation of a dedicated CX Digital Program Manager role to scale Nate’s vision across future onboarding segments.

⭐️ Nate Alcorn | ZoomInfo

Transforming SMB Onboarding with the ZoomInfo Journey Portal

The challenge

ZoomInfo’s 90-day onboarding framework had been a reliable, high-quality model across all customer segments. As the company scaled, new patterns emerged in the data. SMB customers with simple, fast-moving use cases were not gaining additional value from extended, human-managed journeys. They needed faster access to guidance, clearer steps at key moments, and onboarding that adjusted to their goals. At the same time, the team was supporting onboarding volumes in the tens of thousands each year. Nate Alcorn recognized that the framework itself remained strong, but its down-market expression needed to evolve to match customer expectations and improve operational efficiency. The challenge was to modernize the experience without lowering the quality bar.

The creative solution

Nate led the design of Digital Touch, an onboarding model delivered through the ZoomInfo Journey Portal powered by EverAfter. He rebuilt manual steps into a dynamic, self-guided journey that adapts to each customer’s context. The solution included:

• Personalized onboarding plans driven by product mix, ACV, and user behavior.
• Automated milestone logic, status updates, and real-time sync with Salesforce.
• In-product prompts through Pendo that guide customers at the moment of need.
• Clear visibility into progress, enabling customers to move at their own pace.
• Human expertise reserved for strategic moments where it creates meaningful lift.

This architecture moved ZoomInfo from a high-touch model to a scalable digital journey that still feels structured and supported.

The Outcomes

The first 30 days delivered measurable results:

• 215 customers onboarded through Digital Touch, raising its share of new onboarding to 27% from 10–12%.
• Nearly 50% of customers engaged on day one, with 30% moving past the Kickoff milestone.
• Time to Kickoff decreased from days to hours.
• 250 onboarding-manager hours were redirected to complex enterprise accounts.
• Early customer behavior showed strong completion of technical milestones and consistent momentum across stages.

The program’s success led to the creation of a dedicated CX Digital Program Manager role to scale Nate’s vision across future onboarding segments.

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