Meet the winners of 2024’s ChurnHero Awards for customer success

They’re creative, data-driven, customer-centric, innovative, and impactful. They question the status quo, and relentlessly pursue their customers’ success, using ChurnZero software to power their initiatives and achieve breakthrough results.

We’re delighted to introduce the winners of the 2024 ChurnHero Awards for customer success! For the fifth year running, we’ve recognized five customer success teams who achieved remarkable results in one of five categories—onboarding, adoption, renewals and expansion, advocacy, and innovation. Here’s who they are, and how they did it.

2024 Onboarding Hero: Ollie, a Next Glass company

Ollie used ChurnZero journeys and plays to enhance their onboarding process for time-pressed customers. 

The customer success team at Ollie, an ERP system for beverage producers, had an onboarding approach that was too time-intensive—both for their implementation managers and their customers, whose demanding schedules often leave little time for onboarding tasks.

“Our customers often don’t have enough time in their day to do their own jobs, let alone learn a new system,” says Dustin Jeffers, Ollie’s VP of brewery product and experience. “We needed to take a more hands-on approach.”

The Ollie team reimagined the process, using ChurnZero to structure and systemize their onboarding and keep customers on track. The key elements of the initiative include:

ChurnZero journeys for onboarding allow the team to monitor customer’s progress step by step and see where they’re most likely to stall, enabling timely interventions.
Automated reminders and resources powered by plays. By sending resources automatically, the Ollie team can influence customers to stay on track without increasing their implementation managers’ workload.
Data-driven improvements: the Ollie team used ChurnZero to identify patterns and key roadblocks in their onboarding experience, and created quick-start guides and training videos to address them specifically.
Hands-on support: armed with a better understanding of where their customers struggle, Ollie’s implementation managers optimized their process with purposeful check-ins at the most critical moments.

Today, this combination of automation and targeted support model has transformed Ollie’s onboarding results, leading to lower churn and fewer failure-to-launch issues.

“Our customers are much happier too,” says Dustin. “Many of those who went through the new onboarding process are now advocates, recommending Ollie to other breweries who are looking to switch ERP systems.”

2024 Adoption Hero: NinjaCat

NinjaCat’s customer success team used data and automation to drive product adoption. 

NinjaCat’s CS team faced the challenge of maximizing platform adoption and ROI for clients who were underutilizing the digital marketing performance management platform’s features and capabilities.

“We needed a structured approach to monitor customer engagement, assess feature adoption, and ensure that clients were fully leveraging their investment,” says Robin Driver, NinjaCat’s vice president of customer success.

For their initiative, the team developed the NinjaCat Adoption Scorecard, a framework designed to track customer engagement across six key areas: data storytelling, platform efficiency, scalability, user knowledge, user map and workflow optimization. 

The goal: to provide CSMs with clear metrics to evaluate and tailor strategies based on individual customer needs, ultimately driving better adoption and ROI. 

The team implemented their scorecard with the following ChurnZero features to streamline and scale their process: 

A ChurnZero play to automatically tag customer contacts with at least one certification in NinjaCat’s LMS—enabling the team to assess a customer’s level of expertise objectively.
A custom table to track adoption scorecards with detailed fields.
A custom table of Success Plans, enabling alignment on key objectives.
A custom dashboard for adoption scorecards, shared across NinjaCat’s leadership and CSM teams for a unified view of adoption metrics. 
Account Insights for individual adoption tracking. 
Account Insights for Success Plan communication to keep customers informed and engaged.

The adoption tracking and scorecard process empowered NinjaCat to proactively support its customers’ success, align on goals, and foster lasting partnerships. It also allowed them to uncover and close expansion opportunities. 

“Internally, our CSMs felt more empowered and confident using ChurnZero’s tools to monitor customer engagement and tailor strategies effectively,” says Robin. “Meanwhile, client feedback was overwhelmingly positive: our clients appreciated the hands-on support and clear pathway to maximizing their ROI.”

Congratulations also to Untappd, a Next Glass company, 2024’s runner-up in the Adoption Hero category.

Revenue Hero: Protenus

Protenus used ChurnZero to streamline and unite their retention and expansion workflows.

With CSMs working from spreadsheets, account teams using five different systems, a lack of repeatable playbooks, and a reactive approach to customer health monitoring, it was time for leading healthcare compliance analytics platform Protenus to scale and operationalize its customer success function.

To develop a best-in-class digital CS program and tech stack, they chose ChurnZero as their platform and partner, and the game-changing initiative began.

“We partnered with data owners across Protenus to integrate ChurnZero with Salesforce, GSuite/GCal, Slack, Zendesk, Pendo/Pendo NPS, and Skilljar,” says Christa White, vice-president of customer success at Protenus. “We also involved ‘CX Champions’ from each department who took admin training, built our initial team configurations, participated in socializing ahead of launch, and encouraged adoption after launch.” 

Two years later, Christa’s team is driving remarkable results with workflows that include:

Custom dashboards that centralize account activity, tasks, and customer notes, providing full visibility for each CSM, as well as CSM portfolio details for team leads.
Proactive alerts that flag potential risks, such as low engagement or poor health scores, enabling the team to intervene before issues escalated.
Playbooks for strategic outreach including automated training engagements and executive sponsor outreach.
“ChurnScore V2”: a refined health scoring model that incorporates additional ChurnZero datapoints to provide a more accurate picture of customer health.
Repeatable engagement templates for customer outreach, enabling consistent and professional communication across all accounts.

“We closed out Q3 2024 with a 10-point NRR increase year-over-year, and a gross logo retention increase to 98%,” says Christa. “We also expanded our ARR by almost 25% without needing to add any CSM headcount.”

“Meanwhile, our CSMs feel more empowered to identify and intervene at customer health “crisis points”, have more efficient coverage of accounts when team members are on PTO, and have more time to work on projects that make our whole team operate more strategically.”

Congratulations also to Smokeball, our runner-up in 2024’s Revenue Hero category.

Advocacy Hero: ClearGov

ClearGov used ChurnZero’s segmentation and surveys to cultivate their ideal brand advocates.

The client success team at ClearGov, the leading planning and budgeting solutions provider for local governments and schools, needed a faster, easier way to gather customer insights and feedback on the company’s product roadmap.

“Our product and CS teams found it time-consuming going back and forth to manually identify key accounts and contacts, gather insights, and set up Zoom calls,” says Lena Nations, ClearGov’s CS operations manager.

“Our solution was to establish the ‘ClearChampions User Group’, using ChurnZero surveys, to engage some of our most valued clients for their feedback.”

ClearGov’s initiative included:

Targeted customer selection: Using ChurnZero’s segmentation, ClearGov identified clients with positive sentiment who had completed at least one full budget cycle.
“We fully leaned into the data available through ChurnZero to ensure that we targeted only customers who were interested, and willing to take part,” says Lena.
Automated surveys: ClearGov utilized ChurnZero surveys to these segmented customers, streamlining feedback collection and generating a 30% response rate.
Centralized data: Survey responses were automatically associated with customer accounts in ChurnZero, creating a comprehensive and searchable repository of insights.
Cross-functional collaboration: The ClearChampions data was shared between ClearGov’s client success, sales and marketing teams.

The results included 100 survey responses and 30 one-on-one call connections with ClearGov’s CEO for further discussion, as well as further cross-departmental initiatives including a Season of Thanks holiday marketing campaign featuring advocates from the ClearChampions group.

Innovation Hero: HelpSeeker Technologies

HelpSeeker Technologies streamlined their user request tracking with ChurnZero automation and integrations.

“Our customer success team faced a unique challenge in managing monthly requests for our product, where each user has an allotted number of submissions,” says Nicole Croft, manager of customer success and systems mapping at HealthSeeker Technologies, a provider of data-driven digital solutions for driving positive social change.

“We needed a self-service system for users to submit requests, where those requests would be logged in our project management system and reflected in ChurnZero automatically.”

The HelpSeeker team designed an innovative, automated workflow in ChurnZero and integrated it with HubSpot and their Agile project management software. Their solution includes:

Automated user reminders to notify users at key intervals: an initial reminder, a mid-month prompt, and a final nudge for those who haven’t submitted requests by the end of the month.
ChurnZero alerts to notify the team when users exceed their monthly submission limit, enabling proactive outreach and a seamless customer experience.
Real-time data integration with automatic syncing of user submissions between HubSpot forms, ChurnZero, and HelpSeeker’s Agile project management software. This eliminates manual data entry and provides customers with visibility into their submission status.
Feedback-driven iteration: The team collects user feedback on the reminder cadence, adjusting it to strike the ideal balance between encouragement and over-communication.
Cross-departmental insights generated with bi-weekly ChurnZero reports on customer feedback, shared with HelpSeeker’s marketing and sales teams to identify opportunities for customer testimonials.

“Our clients appreciate the timely reminders, which foster consistent communication and ensure no subscription holders are overlooked,” says Nicole. “We’ve observed an increase in submissions and a notable improvement in client sentiment with CSAT scores consistently falling within the 80-100% range.”

“Other departments also now view customer success as a model for automating repetitive tasks and enhancing client interactions,” says Nicole. “We’re helping to foster a forward-thinking mindset across our company, with a focus on expanding automation and continuing to elevate client success.”

Congratulations also to IntelAgree, 2024’s runner-up in the Innovation Hero category.