Here are the nominees
for Most Creative CS leaders of 2023

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.