From residing and respiration innovation, to questioning the established order, to relentlessly pursuing buyer worth and breakthrough outcomes, it takes loads to change into a ChurnHero Award winner. This 12 months, 5 spectacular buyer success groups have joined the checklist.
Every successful group has achieved exceptional ends in one in every of 5 classes—onboarding, adoption, renewals and enlargement, advocacy, and innovation—utilizing sensible, digital-first methods powered by their ChurnZero buyer success software program.
For the fourth 12 months working, we’re delighted to congratulate our churn-fighting, customer-delighting, revenue-driving ChurnHero Award winners! Right here’s what they achieved, and the way they did it.
Onboarding Hero: Smokeball
 Guiding clients to success at scale with sensible, digital playbooks.
With almost 50% of their capability spent on smaller accounts that accounted for round 10% of income, Smokeball’s onboarding group felt overworked, and struggled to drive probably the most worth throughout the onboarding course of. “The period of time that they had with every account was so little that they couldn’t get deep sufficient to to drive adoption,” says Smokeball’s Nav Thomas.
The group answered the problem with a digital onboarding technique that makes use of ChurnZero journeys and performs to determine and mechanically enter the suitable buyer accounts and progress them by onboarding in a scalable approach. One of many group’s onboarding specialists took on a CS operations function to outline, arrange, and refining the journey—a task that he now fulfils full-time.
“Initially, there was a worry {that a} digital journey might imply a worse expertise for these clients, and a threat of upper churn, which we approached by modelling for a worst case of fifty% churn,” says Nav. “Nonetheless, the digital journey was extensively accepted by the section we put in. Prospects who had been radio-silent, with no adoption in any respect, began utilizing the system inside days.”
“We went on to realign this digital strategy for onboarding bigger corporations, with such success that we noticed accounts assigned to onboarders decreased from 67 to 10 in a month, NPS scores growing from 0 to 70, and an enormous inflow of accounts managing finishing onboarding inside 90 days.”
Adoption Hero: Demandbase
Driving adoption with focused, data-driven engagement
Demandbase, a frontrunner in account-based advertising software program, is usually bought by advertising groups to tell and speed up alternatives, with most of its customers coming from gross sales roles.
“As a result of advertising groups have a excessive turnover fee, we would have liked to extend weekly energetic customers to unfold Demandbase’s affect in order that when one individual leaves the ship doesn’t sink,” says Demandbase’s George Walters. “On the gross sales aspect, as a result of gross sales customers are the toughest to get buy-in from with a brand new device, we would have liked extra consumer adoption and utilization.”
George’s group boosted adoption for advertising customers with an in depth playbook referred to as “Digital Contact” to have interaction customers with Demandbase’s Academy studying content material, a identified issue for growing utilization and renewals. The playbook delivered studying content material mechanically based mostly on platform utilization or particular interactions with Demandbase’s implementation or CS group, resulting in a dramatic enhance in Academy engagement and a 40% enhance in weekly energetic customers.
For gross sales customers, the group centered on an adoption play focusing on accounts with decreased utilization, web new gross sales customers, and gross sales customers who’d been added to accounts, however hadn’t used the platform. The play, which delivered easy messaging and fast movies on methods to use Demandbase, generated a big enhance in utilization, and a 33% enhance of time spent in-app.
Renewal / Enlargement Hero: TruVideo
Driving upsells and consciousness with participating in-app content material.
Tasked with rolling out a brand new paid characteristic to TruVideo’s buyer base, Kevin Anderson’s group wanted to succeed in the suitable viewers with a scheduled cadence of engagement, maximize consciousness amongst this viewers, and ship the message with out being too “salesy”. Their reply: a brand new ChurnZero play, consisting of 10 rigorously crafted touchpoints, to teach and have interaction.
The play, which was focused to buyer champions, included e mail teasers, summaries, and have focuses that highlighted elements of the brand new product suite. It additionally included in-app communications with pop-up movies of the brand new characteristic, and surveys to comply with up with clients who purchased the brand new product.
“Considered one of our largest challenges has all the time been methods to attain our clients who don’t reside by e mail or their telephone,” says Kevin. “The in-app bulletins helped us attain the precise product customers, who helped us create momentum in selling the product suite to their managers and decision-makers.”
Inside three months of deploying the play, the group had generated the MRR equal of 17 new clients by upsells, with round 10% of the shopper base adopting the device. Moreover, the group seen a lower in buyer churn: a results of clients gaining a deeper understanding of TruVideo’s product, and changing into much less prone to change to a competitor.
“My CS group was thrilled by how straightforward ChurnZero made it to contact 100% of their account base by a number of channels with a really minimal elevate.,” says Kevin. “Our advertising group have been additionally thrilled that CS had an actual cadence for reaching out to clients; they’ve even adopted a few of these techniques for advertising to prospects.”
Advocacy Hero: Cority
Enhancing the shopper expertise by listening and responding.
Final 12 months, Cority transferred possession of its NPS program to its buyer success group, who automated and centralized it by ChurnZero with excellent outcomes. This 12 months, the group was requested to maintain their excessive response fee whereas additional bettering Cority’s NPS total, and be certain that buyer suggestions was successfully shared with your complete firm.
To drive response charges, the group carried out a multifaceted strategy, utilizing ChurnZero to automate their NPS campaigns, in addition to assist manually enrolling clients—particularly, clients liable to churn, and clients with low engagement. To sort out suggestions gaps, they proactively enrolled buyer segments with traditionally low response charges and adopted up with a easy query: If Cority might make one enchancment to reinforce your expertise, what wouldn’t it be? As well as, respondents obtained a symbolic charitable donation with a social and sustainable affect, underlining Cority’s dedication to creating a optimistic distinction.
As an alternative of specializing in the general rating, CSMs have been inspired to deal with small enhancements inside their buyer base, by being proactive in delving into ache factors and resolving them. “It was really exceptional to witness the dedication of our group as they pursued even a one-point enchancment in NPS from any contact, starting with the detractors and dealing diligently to transform them to promoters”, says Cority’s Simona Barcau.
“The group not solely maintained the spectacular quantity of responses achieved in 2022, however their concerted efforts yielded a exceptional discount in detractors by 17% and a simultaneous enhance in promoters by 14%,” Simona added. “Such a dedicated and unwavering pursuit of excellence embodies the spirit of our group and their dedication to enhancing the shopper expertise.”
Innovation Hero: AppFollow
Aligning customer-facing groups by intelligently built-in expertise. Â
AppFollow’s CS group just lately tackled a number of challenges by ChurnZero: their want for a prioritization system for bug fixes, a necessity for visibility into the standing of fixes and assist duties in numerous platforms, and a have to information prospects by a managed trial expertise.
With Dana Pavel and Anastasiia Rybalko on the helm, the group took an modern, integrations-focused strategy centered round their clients’ ChurnScore well being scores. They pushed ChurnScore information into Zendesk after which into Jira to affect Jira priorities, whereas additionally pushing Jira fields to ChurnZero through Zendesk within the different path, enabling them so as to add Jira activity decision time as a ChurnScore issue.
For managed trials, the group started pulling accounts into ChurnZero earlier than contracts have been signed, enabling them to information managed trials within the platform. A brand new object was added to map these prospects’ targets, aims, and motion objects, and monitor the outcomes. Additionally they added a piece for Enterprise & Trade insights beneath Particulars for CSMs to doc essential details about the shopper and their market.
“We’re nonetheless monitoring the numbers,” says Dana, “however the primary enchancment we’re seeing is extra alignment on how we outline and determine threat which was crucial. We’re getting the entire firm on board with what a ChurnScore is and why it issues, and we’re cultivating shared possession and an understanding that not solely CS is liable for retention. In the meantime, our CS group can simply see and plan for the accounts which are in danger, escalate on time, and be extra ready for our calls with clients.
Congratulations to this 12 months’s runners-up
With so many sturdy entries for 2023’s ChurnHero Awards, this 12 months’s judging panel additionally chosen runners-up for every class. Congratulations to runners-up Demandbase and Gigamon, (Onboarding Hero), IntelAgree (Adoption Hero), ClearGov (Renewal / Enlargement Hero), edays Absence Administration (Advocacy Hero), and Cofense (Innovation Hero)!
“It’s all the time thrilling to find how our clients are making use of ChurnZero expertise to resolve their challenges,” says ChurnZero CEO and co-founder You Mon Tsang. “ We’re honored to be our ChurnHeroes’ platform and companion of selection, and we sit up for seeing what they’ll accomplish in 2024.”
Curious to see the ChurnHeroes of earlier years? Take a look at 2022’s ChurnHero winners, 2021’s ChurnHero winners, and 2020’s ChurnHero winners.Â
