Here are the nominees
for Most Creative CS leaders of 2023

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.

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.

Mercer noticed that CS/CX leaders were operating in silos. Her goal was to build initiatives that would better connect leaders and unlock their wisdom. This year, she organized multiple community events and practices (such as the CX Innovators Fund) to elevate customer success professionals. The result was a high level of engagement and successful connections between CS professionals and potential employers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.