Here are the nominees
for Most Creative CS leaders of 2023

The customer success team at Monday.com was looking for a way to better report on ARR that was at-risk and measure risk beyond just the renewal, while identifying the best contacts to reach out to using data. Dan worked with his team to create a three-fold solution that allowed them to tackle these challenges. Thanks to the process executed, CS teams improved the accuracy of revenue forecasting by having a much more proactive role in risk identification and mitigation, thus reducing the ARR that churned over time. In addition, CSMs were able to receive credit for mitigated risks and further show the business impact of the Customer Success organization.

Customer success managers are responsible for nurturing customers and expanding their accounts. How does a customer who is "ready to grow" look like? Is it possible to identify these growth opportunities and use technology to nurture customers? Daphne took on the challenge of generating a programmatic upgrade play to identify the right customers with growth potential at the right time. A key component of her play was the use of data about product usage, adoption, industry, and customer profiles. As a result of her efforts, the team has seen an increase of $400K in MRR.

AppsFlyer's customer success team uses a variety of customer success tools. Although we used many different tools this year, we realized that combining these tools together was key to getting the results we desired, especially around reporting and customer journeys. Ziv collaborated closely with the customer success operations team to ensure that SalesForce, Looker, and EverAfter are used as effectively as possible. This resulted in increased alignment internally and externally as well as more activities and documentation in SalesForce.

The CS team at Bold was working out of 5 different systems to manage customer interactions, which led to inefficiencies and challenges for scaling.Through Kristin's leadership, a CRM and Marketing Platform was implemented that connected directly through APIs to the product data and customer service tech stack to manage customer interactions and report on employee performance. As a result of her efforts, the team was able to handle 5x the subscriber volume without having to increase team size. Furthermore, their product team can now tie customer service and marketing interactions directly to product metrics, leading to increased engagement with the product.

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.

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.

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.

It became apparent to Chili Piper's success team that they weren't measuring the direct impact CSMs had on expansion revenue. Seth worked closely with the team to roll out a Customer Success Qualified Opportunities (CSQO’s) program to track and measure expansion efforts that came specifically from CSMs. As part of the process, after a CSM qualified an upsell or cross-sell opportunity, they could instantly book a meeting between that customer and their dedicated Account Manager. They knew CSMs contributed to expansion, but now they could track it with an automated workflow. By incentivizing CSMs to source growth ops as part of this program, the team saw a 26X ROI increase.

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.

As the Product Operations Manager working directly with the CS team, being a creative leader is a key function of Hannah’s role at Livly. While Livly's onboarding program was achieving its onboarding goals, the Livly team realized they needed to speed up time-to-value to increase overall customer satisfaction and buy-in. Hannah overhauled the onboarding process with the help of the amazing Livly CS team. Her program upgrade included the introduction of EverAfter as a customer-facing solution so clients could see where they stand at any point of onboarding and access all necessary documents. Additionally, she helped improve the onboarding process by utilizing data more creatively.

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.

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.

After their customers were onboarded, Timely Software had a hard time keeping them engaged. As her customers are creative and visually oriented, Priya, the only CSM on her team, was looking for a visual way to engage with them, which led to her setting up a customer-centric Instagram account. Priya uses the account to participate in the big life moments of her clients on Instagram. She then sends gifts and voice messages for life's big milestones, like anniversaries, new apartments, and new babies. As a result, Priya was able to increase Timely Software's engagement rate, feature adoption rate, and genuine customer feedback, which ultimately heated QBR's target for two consecutive quarters.

As the business grew, Base Enterprise needed a way to differentiate between onboarding for SMEs and enterprises. Minh was asked to redesign the onboarding process and seized the opportunity. There were 5 pillars to his unique program: Clear definition of the objectives, onboarding task list, detailed materials, success factors, and SLAs. As a result of her efforts, all CSM resources are categorized into different segments in one place and accessible from everywhere. Additionally, CSMs are more proactive than ever before because they know what is the next step and if there are any obstacles they must warn their clients or avoid.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Michael is always looking for creative ways to make processes more efficient, use data to the team's advantage, and create customer advocacy programs. His efforts have improved visibility into what's happening across the CS organization, improved customer engagement, and transformed the way PayEm's success team uses data.

While operating with a small team of three CS professionals, Yair needed to find a good way to engage and drive value to more than 1000 customers. By combining two technologies, the team was able to create a fully customized, clear and specific customer experience: Cast.app, which proactively explains WHY a specific CTA should be taken, and a direct link to the EverAfter Customer Hub, which explains HOW to take that specific CTA. With a focus on creating a tech-touch onboarding experience, the team was able to create a faster, more effective onboarding experience with a minimum of human interaction as well as achieve higher onboarding success rates with shorter time to value.

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.

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.