Here are the nominees
for Most Creative CS leaders of 2023

The growing customer-base at AppsFlyer called for the implementation of a smart and personalized 1 to many approach. Bogdan, who leads customer success for the CIS region led the implementation of the different 1-to-many methods that were available such as content creation, webinars, customer hubs and email automation to ensure customers of all sizes are engaged throughout their lifecycle, with a special focus on the customer onboarding program.

The LinearB team was pursuing new ways to demonstrate the real ROI for customers. Guy collaborated with the engineering and product teams to use their own technology stack to tie product adoption and ROI together. Thanks to the successful collaboration with R&D and the product, the team was able to show customers their true ROI during quarterly business review sessions. This effort led to a 10% increase in retention rates.

Seeing that the Customer Success eco-system isn't mature enough in the middle east, Mohammed took it upon himself to grow the local community through advanced knowledge. This past year, Mohammed has worked with CS Leaders from around the world to translate their posts, blogs, and articles into Arabic to increase local interest. Also, he started a series of written interviews with CS experts to help local companies learn from global experts. This is certainly just the beginning and his plan for 2023 includes new channels and lots of activities.

The success team at Chili Piper needed to figure out how to give their SMB customers the same quality of service that was given to their Mid-Market and Enterprise customers — without taxing expensive resources. Marie worked closely with the team to utilize a combination of tech and data including Chili Piper to trigger risk and assign a pooled CS resource to take action. Thanks to the new program, the team is proactively reactivating $594,000+ ARR and this number is continuing to grow.

Delia aimed to improve communication between the sales and CS teams at Oracle, particularly in regards to the handoff process which was a challenging one from a CS Department’s role misconception perspective. In order to solve the problem creatively, she had to address the elephant in the room with empathy, compassion, and understanding, and explain to them why their fears are understandable. The previous handoff process was replaced with a 1:1 call with each Sales Rep to discuss how their collaboration would work when they introduced her to customers. The best practice was shared with her team, leading to smoother interactions between members of the two departments.

Outreach realized their approach to longtail customers wasn't well structured, resulting in low retention rates for that segment. By working closely with his customer success team, Luke created a CS scale function that's proactive rather than ad-hoc, incorporating purely digital engagements. As time went on, the team got more innovative and started using data-driven cohorts. They tested leading indicators to determine which led to churn in accounts and then used outreach.io to "prospect" these accounts. By doing so, they were able to create personalized content based on customer characteristics at a minimal cost and with minimal effort from the CSMs. Consequently, the longtail of Customer Success renewal rate increased from 69% to 77%.

Brittany takes a unique approach to nurturing customer relationships. By making new contacts & sharing internal success, she’s able to expand her footprint within her customer's organization. Brittany leverages LinkedIn Sales Navigator to connect with potential businesses. Once she’s made contacts in new business units, she invites them to hear the success story of her current customers. Whether it’s in the form of a one-on-one solution day or a larger peer group meeting setting, the goal is for her customer to communicate the value they have seen and the problems they have solved with her solution. She encourages other CSMs to leverage their networks and to never underestimate the power of community and its ability to grow within a business.

As the VP of Customer Success at Rakuten, Subha was faced with the challenge to utilize one CS team that would handle end-to-end responsibility for delivery, CS, retention, and expansions within a complex ecosystem of chip, silicon, radio, hardware, and software. Subha created a customer success function from the ground up, building a pool of SMEs, who presented a unified pre-sales and post-sales function, multiple CSMs for each account, a global delivery function serving to other business units and a central delivery model. This model has helped in increasing the subscriber base, revenue, and customer satisfaction for the company.

With over 13,000 customers and multiple products, NAVEX seeks to collect desired customer outcomes and success plans at scale across all customer success segments. Angie spearheaded a project to create a product maturity model that can be used as a customer-facing self-assessment survey. The focus of the survey is to standardize the capture of outcomes and allow customers to self-identify areas of success and opportunities with NAVEX products. While this is a new process, early indicators are that customers will engage with this model, facilitating the ability to drive customer adoption, engagement, and maturity, giving the customer success team greater visibility into customer-desired outcomes.

Kustomer's team (by Meta) wanted to shift from a product-centric mindset to a customer-centric mindset, focusing on the customer's needs and wants and how they can help scale them. In collaboration with his team, Chad implemented two types of meetings: Business Outcome Reviews and Health Checks. Business Outcome Reviews focused on understanding the businesses of their customers. The Health Checks enabled them to understand the client's processes and how they related to their product. Client relationships were strengthened through both engagements, which resulted in higher retention rates.

Karbon's EBRs have always been crucial as there was a direct correlation between customer engagement and product stickiness. Although customers appreciate EBRs, it can be difficult for them (especially executive sponsors) to attend. Anika and her team developed content to engage customers who don't have EBRs in several ways: Videos less than 90 seconds, emails with 2 sentences and a report on the most important metrics, and auto-generated usage reports. Following the launch of the new process, the team began to see meaningful engagement with executive sponsors who were given the right information at the right time. Additionally, they observed a 33% increase in executives joining future calls after receiving short form video content and reports.

Livestorm's Customer Success team was focusing on decreasing churn risk with customer engagement and increased product adoption. Hannah developed a strategic framework based on enhanced engagement content and resources inside the product that increased adoption and decreased churn significantly within global Enterprise portfolios. The new framework used documents, automated message templates, and dedicated resources to get in touch with previously unresponsive (service tier) clients. As a result of the automated content framework, client engagement went up and churn went down.

The team at Joveo was having a problem with measuring the customer feedback consistently. Tripti worked closely with the team on the process of customer feedback by creating the customer happiness score process which now allows the company to not only collect the feedback but is also the top KPI for all customer-facing teams and contributes to customer retention. Thanks to these efforts the customer happiness increased from a score of 5 to 8+ across 90% of accounts. As a result of the customer feedback, the product team took immediate action, which helped increase customer satisfaction.

For some customers that didn't opt in for Success Services at UseWhale, there wasn't really a plan of attack to make them successful and guard the retention rate. It became clear to Stijn that the onboarding process was too simplistic and needed to be structured properly. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Stijn designed a conversational style, human-centered onboarding journey with videos and GIFs (including every gif of the Real Housewives) focused on increasing retention and satisfaction. During the DIY onboarding process, customer education is provided through GIFs, personal videos, and other materials. This way, retention is increased & onboarding at your own pace never was so much fun.

Irina began implementing one-to-many solutions early in the year, even before a structured plan was put in place. The first person on the team to implement EverAfter was Irina, who recognized the need for an effective way to engage customers in a personalized manner. Through her efforts, customer engagement improved, more touchpoints were added, and customers can now communicate with the CS team and learn about the product from a single source.

Gil took on the challenge of changing the team's mindset about QBRs. Rather than showcasing what the product team delivered, the team focused on asking the right questions, exploring and revealing customers' pain points, and setting up measurable goals. Upselling opportunities Additional customer adoption opportunities were revealed, resulting in a drastic increase in the company's NRR customer's realizing more value. The CS team was also able to identify customer pain points more in advance and address their pain points on time, resulting in more satisfied customers that renewed and expanded the engagement. Further, as customers begin to realize the value of the QBRs, more decision-makers join the sessions, resulting in new partnerships.

Many customer success executives are faced with the challenge of deciding whether to let their customer success team manage renewals and upsells. Boaz developed a comprehensive framework to help customers succeed through the strategic question: Who should own renewals and upsells? Customer success or sales? With the framework, political factors were removed and executives could justify their recommendations logically. Thousands of customer success professionals viewed and downloaded this framework. After the framework was publicly shared, the popular question is no longer a topic of discussion in top CS social groups.

The ClientSuccess team has historically offered a one-size-fits-most engagement and onboarding model. Kristi designed a Success Probability Score that analyzed customers based on a specific and unique 11 point criteria scale that would allow to better understand where they were starting to have the greatest impact on their success. Thanks to the tool, The team was now able to set proper expectations with customers and ensure their needs were met. The team has immediately seen an improved experience for customers and employees, higher success rates, stronger adoption, and increased engagement over time.

Historically, enterprise software onboarding in the senior living space was heavy - usually taking multiple months of emails, meetings, emails about meetings, and meetings about emails. By implementing EverAfter, K4Connect gave clients a 24/7 "Digital CSM" to highlight their journey with key actions and program milestones. After using EverAfter to roll out "Mission Control", K4Connect’s industry-leading client portal, the team was able to reduce their onboarding time by 50% while sending a fraction of the emails. By powering everything with their CRM, they gave clients a seamless, secure SSO login experience so everyone could easily be on the same page - literally.

Each CSM at AppsFlyer manages customers in different verticals and ARR levels. KL founded the Scale+ CS team, for mid-market customers. Before KL's scaling strategy, customers usually spent over 90 days onboarding and required support from both a CSM and Solutions Architect.. KL's use of EverAfter along with Zendesk and Zoom webinar softwares reduced onboarding time while increasing time-to-value and removed the dependency on Solutions Architects for customers in this segment. As a result of her one-to-many approach and use of technology, her team now has a lower churn rate than enterprise accounts. Not only that, she also was able to reduce CS headcount requirements.

A new team was formed at Haptik to cater to a specific set of customers with a lot of new team members brought on board. The major problem was the lack of sync, unfamiliarity, and lack of collaboration among many teams. Raman realized that the team members didn't know one another on a personal level and decided to bring them together by asking personal questions. As he reviewed the answers, he realized which teams have what motivations. Which team is more aggressive, which team is more responsive, and what does each team need? Based on their process suggestions and motivation, he created playbooks. As soon as the team was aligned, customer retention rates went up.

The SlapFive team had customers using various modules of their solution at different stages, and few were using all of them. Dana realized she needed to help customers to explore additional potential use cases that could solve more of their challenges. Together with her team, she developed a peer-to-peer customer program called BackStage Pass with a SlapFive RockStar. Through this program, one customer allows their peers to peek behind the curtain and see how they are implementing a specific use case. This is an educational and enabling process for someone who knows what they are going through. In this two-way exchange of value model, everyone wins.

Einav leads one of the customer success teams at AppsFlyer's HQ in Israel. Due to the diverse nature of the Israeli team, as well as the work across many different regions, it can often be challenging to work collaboratively. Einav strives to bring teams together and create a sense of togetherness. With the realization that more tech knowledge can help the team thrive, she started a collaborative modesty across the team that had a significant impact on the team's satisfaction and success. Amongst her efforts was the enforcement of solution architects and other stakeholders to help with different integrations and more complex implementations.

As a startup with limited resources and a growing customer base, the team at CosTheta was struggling to give their customers a proper post-sale journey for onboarding and adoption, which led to increased churn and missed expansion opportunities. Jyo worked closely with customers and the internal team to develop a more efficient CS strategy that allowed the team to showcase value to customers at scale, and has offered us a way to delight our customers more efficiently. This in turn, has helped the internal team become more focused and has also allowed to plan in advance the customer journey for a product they haven't launched yet.

It was clear to the team at GoCanves that increasing its headcount alone would not lead to a meaningful improvement in their longtail customer experience. Using the existing CS tech stack, Brady built a journey that represented how the customer wanted to interact with the product, giving them support when they needed it, and giving them space when they were self-serving. If a customer was struggling and needed a human touch, they had a scalable way to support 4k+ clients with only a small team of 4. With 90% of the journey automated and the establishment of conditional plays tied to defined "moments of truth", their clients became dramatically more successful.

During this past year, Stuart has been sharing his famous "Steal this workflow" content which allows CS professionals to learn about smart success plays and automations he has built using Hubspot. Steal this workflow posts include diagrams and detailed processes on how to use Hubspot as a CS tool. Stuart is recording videos and often explaining how to deliver a connected customer experience, how to improve customer onboarding and how to make the most of your time. These posts were able to attract lots of traction and are continuously empowering CSMs to improve the way they manage their operations . People who use Hubspot can implement his workflows and optimize their results with detailed plays and action items.