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Here’s to customer success in 2023: a wrap-up of new ChurnZero features, resources, and recognition
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Goodbye, growth at all costs. Hello, efficiency, profitability, and getting the most from the resources you have. While a rollercoaster year for SaaS, 2023 saw customer success teams held the line, set new standards and best practices, and evolve CS into a discipline more sophisticated and significant than ever. We’re proud to have played a supporting role in their success.
“It was a tough macro year for B2B companies,” says our CEO and co-founder You Mon Tsang, “but ChurnZero managed milestones like first-to-market product innovations, numerous awards, industry analyst accolades, and new partnerships across landscape. The work we have done has garnered us the highest rated CS platform among the pundits and the people!”
Here’s a recap of our product and engineering teams’ greatest hits of 2023 – plus five valuable webinars to catch up on in your holiday-week downtime and more 2023 highlights – starting with this reel of new features spanning everything from AI to sophisticated automations for your CS ops team.
Did you miss any of these features as we launched them? Here’s a quick recap.
ChurnZero’s top feature releases of 2023
Customer Success AI™ is the first generative AI capability built into a customer success platform, and lets you create email drafts, conduct research, and get new ideas on demand. CS AI also powers Customer Briefs to give you comprehensive summaries of any account’s attributes, health, usage, engagement, communications and more—with a single click.
Launchpad is your in-platform library of playbook and journey templates, built to help your team build and scale digital programs with confidence. Created by CS experts, Launchpad’s customizable templates give you better customer outcomes more repeatedly, while accelerating your team’s expertise with ChurnZero and the best practices of CS.
Renewal & Forecast Hub lets you take ownership of account growth and recurring revenue with confidence. Our in-platform forecasting and management tool integrates with leading CRMs to help you and your team forecast accurately, maximize growth, identify and mitigate churn risks, and design effective, collaborative revenue strategies.
We also partnered with industry leaders like Higher Logic Vanilla and Absorb LMS to help you streamline, unite and expand your workflows and impact across digital CS, customer education, community management and more.
Explore more of ChurnZero’s innovative features and capabilities here.
Will AI replace most of your customer success team by 2030? This year, ChurnZero put the question to four customer success leaders in an Oxford-style debate at BIG RYG 2023. Watch the debate and see how the audience voted here.
ChurnZero’s top customer success webinars of 2023
Our 2023 customer success webinar series saw experts from across the SaaS industry join us to help you enhance your customer experience, work more efficiently, and build more revenue. Did you catch these five sessions? You can view each webinar in full by clicking its title link.
1: Your customer champion just left. Now do this.
An unmanaged key customer contact change has a 51% chance of churn in 12 months, according to research by Sturdy—and 65% of accounts with an “executive change” will churn within 12 months.
This is why it’s essential to establish a playbook for champion change, says Ali Cudby. Do it right and apply it early to mitigate churn risk faster, and position yourself as a helpful partner to win new champions and earn long-lasting loyalty. Watch Ali’s webinar to learn how to navigate the critical moment of champion change and build stronger customer relationships.
2: 2023 SaaS retention benchmarks
“Growth at all costs” is yesterday’s news; as SaaS moves into 2024, investors want profitable growth and solid customer retention strategies. But how exactly should you be measuring the effectiveness of your retention?
Find out with SaaS Capital managing director Rob Belcher, and ChurnZero CEO You Mon Tsang, as they dig into 2023’s B2B SaaS retention study to analyze three customer retention benchmarks—median NRR segmented by ACV, median GRR segmented by ACV, and median NRR and GRR segmented by ARR—that stood out.
3: Scaling customer success with digital strategies, AI and automation.
This year, as every SaaS business looked for ways to cut costs while still increasing service levels and recurring revenue, digital customer success went from optional to a necessity.
However, some leaders remain concerned that the digital, automated approach leads to an impersonal, shallow customer experience. That’s not the case, says Lynn Tsoflias: it’s entirely possible to keep your customer experience the same, while delivering it in a more efficient, scalable way. Watch Lynn’s webinar to learn her framework for scaling your operations and outreach with a digital strategy that makes the most of automation and generative AI.
4: The five customer love languages
As a customer, there’s nothing better than working with a CSM who really gets you: who understands your needs and knows what your perfect business review looks like. However, the path to achieving that idyllic customer connection isn’t always straightforward.
The different ways in which we communicate and define value can sour otherwise great relationships, says Bob London—but there’s a secret to unlocking better communication that’s more formula than fate. Tune into Bob’s webinar to learn the techniques and disruptive questions that’ll help you discover your customers’ love languages and enjoy more productive relationships.
5: The leadership leap: From first time manager to confident leader
The job is never done in customer success, where everyday tasks are enough to stress even the most productive individual contributors. Add new leadership responsibilities to the mix, and work suddenly can feel overwhelming—as it did for first-time manager Ryan Johansen.
Ryan found himself working 12-hour days, feeling like he wasn’t accomplishing much, and even having panic attacks. Knowing that something had to give, he set out to research and acquire better leadership skills; a journey that led Ryan to start a consultancy training new managers to make the leap to leadership. Watch his webinar to learn where to find the courage to lead, and how to succeed.
Thank you to the 600 customer success leaders who joined us at one of 23 RYG Meetup events in 17 cities this year! Find a RYG meetup near you, or a virtual RYG event, here.
A year of customer success partnership, advocacy, and leadership
We believe in supporting, recognizing , and elevating our customers, our partners, and our industry. Here are a few ways in which we did that this year.
2023 CSM Appreciation Week and the CSM Awards
Our second annual celebration of CS professionals and their impact included 2023’s CSM Awards, recognizing exceptional customer success managers for their skills in renewal communications, re-engagement strategies, digital-first thinking, use of video, and customer saves. Congratulations again to winners Matthew Weaver, Aleksandra Boruk, Yair Bortinger, Ellen Timmers, and Addie Batson.
2023 ChurnHero Awards for customer success
For the fourth year running, five spectacular customer success teams took to the podium for 2023’s ChurnHero Awards, a recognition of remarkable results achieved with their ChurnZero software. Congratulations again to the CS teams at Smokeball, Demandbase, TruVideo, Cority, and AppFollow for their relentless pursuit of customer value and results for their companies!
2023 Customer Success Leadership Study
Our flagship research project and the definitive report on the CS industry, the Customer Success Leadership Study entered its fourth year with more than 1,200 participants. With our research partners ESG, SaaStr and HubSpot, we captured new insights on CS budgets, team sizes, tech stack, AI usage, decision-making, renewal and expansion ownership, compensation, measurement, and collaboration. See the highlights and download your own copy here.
And finally… how ChurnZero became the most-loved customer success software of 2023
“A game-changer for managing customers at scale,” said one customer success leader. See more than 1,000 five-star reviews from ChurnZero customers on G2.
We’re grateful to every ChurnZero customer who left a review this year with G2, who named us the category leader in customer success software, and top-rated for user satisfaction. Thank you also to every customer who reviewed us on TrustRadius, where we earned 2023 TrustRadius Best Of awards for feature set, customer relationships, and value for price.
Meanwhile, the Software & Information Industry Association recognized us with the 2023 CODiE Award for best customer success management solution, and we scored the highest in the current offering category in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Success Platforms, Q4 2023, an independent assessment of the top CS vendors in the market.