Announcing the Winners of ChurnZero’s 2020 ChurnHero Awards

Superior Customer Success programs set great companies apart from their peers. Aligning client and vendor goals to create mutually beneficial outcomes can make a big splash – not just on customer loyalty and happiness, but also your bottom line. That’s why, starting this year, we’ll recognize organizations that have shown a commitment to fostering customer centricity with the 2020 ChurnHero Awards.

In its inaugural year, the ChurnHero Awards recognize ChurnZero customers for their commitment to best-in-class Customer Success programs.

The Award Categories

This year’s four winners come from around the globe and demonstrate how Customer Success can build meaningful relationships with their clients in proactive, impactful, and measurable ways. With fierce competition and nearly a hundred applicants, our judges of CS experts had their work cut out for them.

Read on to learn about the winners for the following ChurnHero Award categories:

• Onboarding Hero – An innovative way your team has made your onboarding process more effective and value-focused
• Adoption Hero – An innovative way your team has successfully driven product adoption and customer ROI
• Renewal/Expansion Hero – An innovative way your team has proactively handled continuing and expanding your partnerships
• Advocacy Hero – An innovative way your team has cultivated customer advocates to drive growth for your company

Onboarding Hero – Sendoso

Sendoso, the leading sending platform, is the most effective way for revenue-driving teams to stand out with new ways to engage at strategic points throughout the customer journey. The platform enables teams around the world to send personalized gifts, branded swag, and eGifts at scale. We’re excited to recognize Sendoso as the winner of the Onboarding Category for the 2020 ChurnHero Awards!

Approximately one year ago, Sendoso’s onboarding experience was simply “point and click” training. This approach worked well, but still left room for improvement. Sendoso’s onboarding team knew they could do better.

By taking a deep dive into their onboarding process, the team sought to reduce their customers’ time to value. They mapped out the ideal onboarding process and put themselves in their customers’ shoes, asking themselves questions like “what does success look like?” and “how should customers feel during and after onboarding?”. This helped the team focus on tasks and milestones that result in stellar onboarding experiences. After evaluating this essential stage of the customer lifecycle, the team mapped out an ideal onboarding process. Then using ChurnZero, Sendoso was quickly able to implement their new onboarding journey at scale.

With the ability to quickly apply their findings from paper to practice, the team saw an immediate lift  – Sendoso realized a 34% lift in customers sending in their first 60 days. Not only that, but the team noticed customers were sending more gifts – almost double!

Adoption Hero – Quantum Workplace

Quantum Workplace provides modern tools for employee success. They help leaders connect the dots between engagement and performance with tools including employee surveys, goal setting and tracking tools, peer-to-peer recognition, real-time feedback, and robust people analytics. As a pioneer of some of the earliest employee engagement and performance software, the group has since partnered with thousands of organizations. We’re excited to announce Quantum Workplace as the inaugural winner of the Adoption Hero award!

Following an evaluation of their entire customer experience, Quantum Workplace’s team looked to improve the adoption stage of their customers’ journey. Gaps in their existing process led to client requests being handled in a reactive way. Despite an overall positive sentiment from their book of business, the team knew they could improve.

By leveraging ChurnZero’s Plays & Journeys, Quantum Workplace could better detect the phases of the customer journey that their clients were in. With the help of alerts, CSMs & Account Managers are also notified as customers move from one journey phase to another. By building alerts around important account changes – such as a change in ChurnScore, occurrence of key events in their software, or drop in usage – every CSM is now equipped to deliver the right service at the right time. Learn more about Quantum Workplace’s story below.

Quantum Workplace’s swift implementation of Plays, Journeys and Alerts has led to tremendous results. Not only has the team experienced sharp increases in Net Promoter Score® (NPS) , but customers are more engaged than ever. As Jarah Banks, their Customer Experience Director shared, “customers have shifted from seeing us as a once-a-year tool for annual surveying to a subscription they can use year-round.” It’s no surprise that monthly active usage of the platform has increased 70%!

Renewal/Expansion Hero – Affise

Affise is a performance marketing platform that helps marketers to run and analyze their campaigns and interact with affiliates. Their mission is to reduce complexity by providing business intelligence tools that help their customers to make decisions faster and automate routine work based on data. Affise is the inaugural winner of the 2020 ChurnHero awards for the Renewal/Expansion category!

Like other growing Customer Success organizations, the Affise team sought to better define their strategic goals and metrics. In order to grow the company’s efficiency, the team knew they needed to put aggressive goals in place. Among these were ambitious targets for their net retention, expansion, and churn rates. To meet these goals, the team knew they needed to better understand each customer’s objectives and pain points. Better harnessing their usage data led to more productive customer conversations and helped their accounts grow. Learn more about Affise’s story below.

Despite their lofty goals, Affise hit their desired metrics only a few months after implementing a Customer Success solution. Among the team’s highlights:

• Despite the COVID-19 crisis, the team reduced company churn to be less than 2%
• Lifetime value of clients increased over 400%
• Expansion rates have grown steadily – even doubling over the course of one month!

The impact of Affise’s use of ChurnZero goes beyond just numbers. Thanks to tools like Alerts, the entire CS team finds the monitoring of customer activity to be more convenient.  As Maksim Krupitsa, Customer Success Manager shared, “ChurnZero alerts completely changed my approach to monitoring customers’ activity!”

Advocacy Hero –  Sales Boomerang 

Sales Boomerang is the only automated borrower intelligence and retention SaaS platform in the world for the banking and mortgage industry. Their SaaS platform is designed to automate the qualified lead generation process and monetize the data within your current CRM. Their tool turns mortgage lending organizations into Customer Success powerhouses by putting their teams in the right place at the best time. We’re excited to recognize Sales Boomerang as the winner of the Advocacy Category of the 2020 ChurnHero Awards!

Sales Boomerang has always taken a customer-first approach to managing their book of business. As the team looked for areas to improve, they challenged themselves to increase user adoption. Despite already strong engagement, the team recognized the power of customer advocacy and knew they needed an easy way to create and scale authentic customer resources.

As the team discussed desired outcomes, they identified two specific types of insights to seek from their power users that would make up the bulk of their testimonial library:

• First person perspectives on the tangible benefits their platform provides
• Examples of use cases, victories and other creative applications of Sales Boomerang

So how do you incentivize thousands of customers to leave a testimonial? Sales Boomerang launched a video contest where the winner would win a high-end entertainment center. In an era where everyone is working from home, this prize proved to be the perfect incentive. The team used ChurnZero’s In-App and Plays functionality to push the contest announcement to all their users. Not only did they avoid issues associated with mass emails (bounce backs, blacklisting, attachments) but ChurnZero served as a tracking tool to ensure they reached all desired users.

With the ability to quickly launch their testimonial video contest, the team saw immediate results. Sales Boomerang received dozens of video testimonials that they continue to use on social media, their website and in prospecting efforts. Paired with ChurnZero’s automation capabilities, the administrative burden of running such a contest was taken off of the Marketing and CS teams.

 

Congratulations to all of the winners of the 2020 ChurnHero awards. We can’t wait to celebrate your achievements at our next in-person BIG RYG event.