Here are the nominees
for Most Creative CS leaders of 2023

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Danielle was seeking a mechanism that would ensure her team will be focused on the right target customers, understanding their true needs and challenges from a deep perspective. In order to build this process, there were many moving parts and new practices that had to be established. To name a few: She implemented a regular cadence of cross-functional "Voice of the Customer" insight meetings to highlight key themes from Sales, Success, Support and Marketing. She also was focused on creating alignment between customer-facing "Product Experts" and their Product Teams. She utilized tools like Gong to share customer calls and specific snippets with Product, as well as had CS make warm introductions to Product for customer interviews. As a result of her efforts, customer satisfaction and product adoption increased.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.