Meet the winners of 2023’s ChurnHero Awards for customer success

From living and breathing innovation, to questioning the status quo, to relentlessly pursuing customer value and breakthrough results, it takes a lot to become a ChurnHero Award winner. This year, five spectacular customer success teams have joined the list.

Each winning team has achieved remarkable results in one of five categories—onboarding, adoption, renewals and expansion, advocacy, and innovation—using smart, digital-first strategies powered by their ChurnZero customer success software.

For the fourth year running, we’re delighted to congratulate our churn-fighting, customer-delighting, revenue-driving ChurnHero Award winners! Here’s what they achieved, and how they did it.

Onboarding Hero: Smokeball

 Guiding customers to success at scale with smart, digital playbooks.

With nearly 50% of their capacity spent on smaller accounts that accounted for around 10% of revenue, Smokeball’s onboarding team felt overworked, and struggled to drive the most value during the onboarding process. “The amount of time they had with each account was so little that they couldn’t get deep enough to to drive adoption,” says Smokeball’s Nav Thomas.

The team answered the challenge with a digital onboarding strategy that uses ChurnZero journeys and plays to identify and automatically enter the right customer accounts and progress them through onboarding in a scalable way. One of the team’s onboarding specialists took on a CS operations role to define, set up, and refining the journey—a role that he now fulfils full-time.

“Initially, there was a fear that a digital journey could mean a worse experience for those customers, and a risk of higher churn, which we approached by modelling for a worst case of 50% churn,” says Nav. “However, the digital journey was widely accepted by the segment we put in. Customers who had been radio-silent, with no adoption at all, started using the system within days.”

“We went on to realign this digital approach for onboarding larger companies, with such success that we saw accounts assigned to onboarders reduced from 67 to 10 in a month, NPS scores increasing from 0 to 70, and a massive influx of accounts managing completing onboarding within 90 days.”

Adoption Hero: Demandbase

Driving adoption with targeted, data-driven engagement

Demandbase, a leader in account-based marketing software, is typically purchased by marketing teams to inform and accelerate opportunities, with most of its users coming from sales roles.

“Because marketing teams have a high turnover rate, we needed to increase weekly active users to spread Demandbase’s impact so that when one person leaves the ship doesn’t sink,” says Demandbase’s George Walters. “On the sales side, because sales users are the hardest to get buy-in from with a new tool, we needed more user adoption and usage.”

George’s team boosted adoption for marketing users with a detailed playbook called “Digital Touch” to engage users with Demandbase’s Academy learning content, a known factor for increasing usage and renewals. The playbook delivered learning content automatically based on platform usage or specific interactions with Demandbase’s implementation or CS team, leading to a dramatic increase in Academy engagement and a 40% increase in weekly active users.

For sales users, the team focused on an adoption play targeting accounts with decreased usage, net new sales users, and sales users who’d been added to accounts, but hadn’t used the platform. The play, which delivered simple messaging and quick videos on how to use Demandbase, generated a large increase in usage, and a 33% increase of time spent in-app.

Renewal / Expansion Hero: TruVideo

Driving upsells and awareness with engaging in-app content.

Tasked with rolling out a new paid feature to TruVideo’s customer base, Kevin Anderson’s team needed to reach the right audience with a scheduled cadence of engagement, maximize awareness among this audience, and deliver the message without being too “salesy”. Their answer: a new ChurnZero play, consisting of 10 carefully crafted touchpoints, to educate and engage.

The play, which was targeted to customer champions, included email teasers, summaries, and feature focuses that highlighted aspects of the new product suite. It also included in-app communications with pop-up videos of the new feature, and surveys to follow up with customers who bought the new product.

“One of our biggest challenges has always been how to reach our customers who don’t live by email or their phone,” says Kevin. “The in-app announcements helped us reach the actual product users, who helped us create momentum in promoting the product suite to their managers and decision-makers.”

Within three months of deploying the play, the team had generated the MRR equivalent of 17 new customers through upsells, with around 10% of the customer base adopting the tool. Additionally, the team noticed a decrease in customer churn: a result of customers gaining a deeper understanding of TruVideo’s product, and becoming less likely to switch to a competitor.

“My CS team was thrilled by how easy ChurnZero made it to contact 100% of their account base through several channels with a very minimal lift.,” says Kevin. “Our marketing team were also thrilled that CS had a real cadence for reaching out to customers; they’ve even adopted some of these tactics for marketing to prospects.”

Advocacy Hero: Cority

Enhancing the customer experience by listening and responding.

Last year, Cority transferred ownership of its NPS program to its customer success team, who automated and centralized it through ChurnZero with outstanding results. This year, the team was asked to sustain their high response rate while further improving Cority’s NPS overall, and ensure that customer feedback was effectively shared with the entire company.

To drive response rates, the team implemented a multifaceted approach, using ChurnZero to automate their NPS campaigns, as well as support manually enrolling customers—specifically, customers at risk of churn, and customers with low engagement. To tackle feedback gaps, they proactively enrolled customer segments with historically low response rates and followed up with a simple question: If Cority could make one improvement to enhance your experience, what would it be? In addition, respondents received a symbolic charitable donation with a social and sustainable impact, underlining Cority’s commitment to making a positive difference.

Instead of focusing on the overall score, CSMs were encouraged to focus on small improvements within their customer base, by being proactive in delving into pain points and resolving them. “It was truly remarkable to witness the dedication of our team as they pursued even a one-point improvement in NPS from any contact, beginning with the detractors and working diligently to convert them to promoters”, says Cority’s Simona Barcau.

“The team not only maintained the impressive volume of responses achieved in 2022, but their concerted efforts yielded a remarkable reduction in detractors by 17% and a simultaneous increase in promoters by 14%,” Simona added.  “Such a committed and unwavering pursuit of excellence embodies the spirit of our team and their dedication to enhancing the customer experience.”

Innovation Hero: AppFollow

Aligning customer-facing teams through intelligently integrated technology.  

AppFollow’s CS team recently tackled several challenges through ChurnZero: their need for a prioritization system for bug fixes, a need for visibility into the status of fixes and support tasks in different platforms, and a need to guide prospects through a managed trial experience.

With Dana Pavel and Anastasiia Rybalko at the helm, the team took an innovative, integrations-focused approach centered around their customers’ ChurnScore health scores. They pushed ChurnScore data into Zendesk and then into Jira to impact Jira priorities, while also pushing Jira fields to ChurnZero via Zendesk in the other direction, enabling them to add Jira task resolution time as a ChurnScore factor.

For managed trials, the team began pulling accounts into ChurnZero before contracts were signed, enabling them to guide managed trials in the platform. A new object was added to map these prospects’ goals, objectives, and action items, and track the outcomes. They also added a section for Business & Industry insights under Details for CSMs to document important information about the customer and their market.

“We’re still monitoring the numbers,” says Dana, “but the main improvement we’re seeing is more alignment on how we define and identify risk which was very important. We’re getting the whole company on board with what a ChurnScore is and why it matters, and we’re cultivating shared ownership and an understanding that not only CS is responsible for retention. Meanwhile, our CS team can easily see and plan for the accounts that are at risk, escalate on time, and be more prepared for our calls with customers.

Congratulations to this year’s runners-up

With so many strong entries for 2023’s ChurnHero Awards, this year’s judging panel also selected runners-up for each category. Congratulations to runners-up Demandbase and Gigamon, (Onboarding Hero), IntelAgree (Adoption Hero), ClearGov (Renewal / Expansion Hero), edays Absence Management (Advocacy Hero), and Cofense (Innovation Hero)!

“It’s always exciting to discover how our customers are applying ChurnZero technology to solve their challenges,” says ChurnZero CEO and co-founder You Mon Tsang. “ We’re honored to be our ChurnHeroes’ platform and partner of choice, and we look forward to seeing what they’ll accomplish in 2024.”

Curious to see the ChurnHeroes of previous years? Check out 2022’s ChurnHero winners, 2021’s ChurnHero winners, and 2020’s ChurnHero winners.