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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.