Announcing the Winners of ChurnZero’s 2021 ChurnHero Awards

Your Customer Success program is a telling datapoint when comparing great companies apart from their peers. The effects of CS run deeper than just customer retention – this instrumental function can have a profound impact on your long-term corporate success.

In its second year, we’re excited to recognize ChurnZero customers in our 2021 ChurnHero Awards. Read below to learn about the awards and meet this year’s winners.

The Award Categories

This year’s eight winners come from around the globe and touch many different industries. Recipients were recognized in one of four 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 – Definitive Healthcare

Definitive Healthcare’s passion is to transform data, analytics, and expertise into healthcare commercial intelligence. They help clients uncover the right markets, opportunities, and people, so they can shape tomorrow’s healthcare industry.

We’re excited to recognize Definitive Healthcare as a winner of the Onboarding category for the 2021 ChurnHero Awards!

As Definitive Healthcare entered 2021, they realized they needed to revamp their onboarding process to reduce churn. With ChurnZero, they were able to assign a customer health score to each of their clients to gain a better line of sight on accounts at a higher risk of turnover. Once they had the customer health scores in place, they were able to identify a historical baseline to establish measurable goals for success as they undertook developing a new onboarding process.

They also completely revamped their internal processes to improve the customer transition between the Sales team and the Customer Success team.  By creating a handoff document in their CRM, the CS team ensured the critical pieces of information needed to maintain a successful relationship were captured before the client’s kick-off.

The team also used ChurnZero Plays to establish a set cadence of tasks relevant to the onboarding process for CSMs. The Plays helped automate some of the initial tasks and alerts, allowing the team to replicate the process at scale and ensure key touchpoints were  met.

They also used ChurnZero Journeys to map out a new client onboarding journey at scale and establish a more formalized implementation plan for each client. To help CSMs achieve their clients’ goals, they created a checklist of recommended workflows that better aligned their engagements with the clients’ main reasons for purchasing Definitive Healthcare’s solutions. They also now share External Journey Reports with their clients to ensure their buy-in on the process and goals.

And lastly, they introduced more direct touchpoints in the first 90 days to promote active account engagement and address any issues, concerns, or updates to the customer journey.

One of the biggest immediate impacts the team saw was changes in the customer health score after onboarding. With the new processes and tools in place, a majority of new accounts now exit onboarding with a positive customer health score.

They also had 100% of new clients engage in outcome discussions during the kick-off call, and over 86% engage in both outcome discussions and training. Finally, their average churn score decreased in just a few months.

Onboarding Hero – VAIRKKO

VAIRKKO is an online cloud HR and LMS software company that provides innovative and affordable HRIS and Training Management solutions exclusively written for businesses within the small to mid-sized marketplace.

We’re excited to recognize VAIRKKO as a winner of the Onboarding category for the 2021 ChurnHero Awards!

VAIRKKO’s onboarding program began as a scripted approach to teach each component of their system. It was spread out over several meetings, and the onus was on the customer to practice and schedule their next meeting. The training also didn’t instill confidence in the user when they  later logged in on their own to build out real systems for their organization. Additionally, onboarding times were extremely long, usually around six months, and there was little data to track or improve this timeframe.

To address these challenges, they knew they needed two things: a hybrid approach (high touch from their end AND high customer accountability) and more data to help streamline the process. So, they started collecting data upfront about their customers’ goals, challenges, and priorities.

They built Journeys for each type of onboarding scenario to better track progress and milestone completion. This gave them insight into where their customers lost steam in the process, indicating they needed assistance, and where their team was the bottleneck, hindering the process. This insight equipped their Implementation Manager to bring problems and solutions to their team meetings where they could easily iterate the process.

They also used In-App Messaging to communicate with hard-to-reach clients in the onboarding process. Additionally, they created WalkThroughs to demo some of the product features that are easier to comprehend but typically go unnoticed, leaving more time to cover critical items during their onboarding trainings.

In the last 180 days, 90% of new customers finished onboarding within their goal timeframe, and 91% of new clients that have finished onboarding are showing weekly or even daily product usage.

The team has also seen a large decrease in questions and training-based support tickets being submitted by customers. They are also seeing a significant decrease in retraining requests coming into the Customer Success team, which has freed them up to be more proactive with strategic outreach.

 

Adoption Hero – Sibme

Sibme is an LMS that enables teams to build a culture of continuous learning in their organization. Sibme brings out the best in teams and helps them create engaging, curated, and personalized experiences built to sustain long-term professional learning and personal growth.

We’re excited to recognize Sibme as a winner of the Adoption category for the 2021 ChurnHero Awards!

Like many SaaS products, the multitude of features and use cases that Sibme powers can be overwhelming to a new user. This was complicated by the fact that end users often didn’t participate in onboarding to successfully message and roll out adoption. Because of this, they historically saw suboptimal adoption rates. And while NPS® had been consistently high with their admins, their end-user NPS had been low for years.

To solve this, the team used ChurnZero to create segments of customers based on a variety of factors,such as use case, activity, NPS, length of adoption, etc. These segments allowed the team to enroll customers in different series of Journeys and Plays throughout the year and track their level of engagement with training materials, as well as track the related engagement metrics. With their new segmentation model, they could quickly look at a group of customers and find the best training and marketing assets to encourage increased feature adoption and add value. Additionally, by tracking  usage metrics and  other customer datapoints, they could  quickly identify which users needed additional attention and alert the team when key stakeholders needed to intervene. This usage and engagement data was also shared between CS, Sales, and Marketing to allow adoption to be a top priority for all.

Since revamping their training and engagement program, they have seen a 70% increase in user adoption and a 50% increase in active time-in-app over the past year. This multi-tiered system of support for clients not only increased user activity, but has also contributed to deeper and more productive client relationships, which has contributed to NRR of 130%.

Adoption Hero – SPINS

SPINS is a wellness-focused data company and advocate for the National Product Industry. At SPINS, they believe there’s more than meets the eye to data, and they strive to transform raw data into intelligent and actionable business solutions.

We’re excited to recognize SPINS as a winner of the Adoption category for the 2021 ChurnHero Awards!

The SPINS service model doesn’t allow for 100% coverage of a CSM to every client. Because of this, CSMs could not proactively communicate with their entire book of business They needed to identify the quickest and easiest way to reach out to and engage with clients that did not have a dedicated CSM.

To prioritize their communication efforts, they created a client segmentation strategy based on  usage metrics, ChurnScores, and meeting counts They then deployed a series of communications to address particular client needs, such as data-tracking reminders and training materials.

With this new model, they covered 100% of clients with proactive outreach, and grew 1:1 coverage by 102%. They also increased client retention among SMB subscriptions by 2%.

Renewal/Expansion Hero – Jisr

Jisr is a HR and Payroll Management system created specifically for small and medium sized businesses in Saudi Arabia to make HR easy for admins and employees.

We’re excited to recognize Jisr as a winner of the Renewal/Expansion category for the 2021 ChurnHero Awards!

Previously, the Jisr team didn’t have a set renewal process, so they decided to develop one to help expand their growing customer base. They started by thinking about the ideal renewal journey from the client’s perspective and created a process that starts 120 days out from the next renewal date. With this new process in place, the team boosted their renewal rates by giving themselves ample time to secure the renewal and work on expansion opportunities.

The team used ChurnScores as their guiding metric for renewal communications which allowed them to more accurately forecast renewals.

They also built clear compensation plans into their internal processes, so the team knew what goals to work towards.

Renewal/Expansion Hero – Solink

Solink is a subscription-based software that connects your camera footage with your POS data to give you the insight you need to increase your profits, reduce theft, and help you reclaim your time.

We’re excited to recognize Solink as a winner of the Renewal/Expansion category for the 2021 ChurnHero Awards!

Solink’s business model relies heavily on expansion within their customers’ business. They sell to brick -and-mortar businesses and bill based on the number of locations they are installed in, not the number of users/licenses. With the large retail customers, reducing the time to expansion (time to value) is critically important. Their team had few indicators for predicting what leads to expansion or when it may happen or how to prompt it.

The team created a customer health score specifically for expansion opportunities that identified the right time to approach customers about upsell and cross-sell conversations.

Under this new process, expansions sales skyrocketed – accounting for 67% of their overall revenue – and Customer Success shifted from being viewed as a cost center to a profit center.

Advocacy Hero –  Affise

Affise is a partnership marketing platform for brands, advertisers, and agencies to automate and scale their partner relations via all possible performance marketing channels including, traditional affiliates, influencers, networks, and agencies.

We’re excited to recognize Affise as a winner of the Advocacy category for the 2021 ChurnHero Awards!

One of the team’s goals and challenges has been cultivating customer trust and advocacy. They needed to improve customer retention and to increase expansion and new business MRR based on their internal referral program.

The team implemented NPS® surveys that were sent via In-App Messages, with an email follow-up  if they didn’t receive an initial response.

When submitting their NPS, if a customer included product feedback in the additional comments section, the team created a special task to track these development requests. This data was then pulled using Live Exports and shared across the Product and Customer Success teams.

They also started a customer review program where they incentivized customers to provide their feedback. They carefully tracked all of the reviews and reward fulfillment in ChurnZero.

They also built a customer referral program where they could share out the referral link with customers and track child-account creation.

 

As a result of their customer advocacy efforts, they doubled  their customer lifetime value (LTV) compared to the previous year. Also based on the  feature request feedback from customers, they implemented 26 features that helped make their product even better and allowed their customers to feel heard.

As a result of their new referral program,  they  opened 21 child accounts, and had even more accounts referred to them from existing accounts.

And lastly, thanks to  their customer review program, they moved from 10^th place in their product category on G2 to the 3^rd position and have collected 40+ new reviews.

Advocacy Hero –  FlexyBox

FlexyBox is a POS system tailored for your industry that gathers your entire operation into a single system and frees up time that can then be spent on your customers.

We’re excited to recognize FlexyBox as a winner of the Advocacy category for the 2021 ChurnHero Awards!

To meet the team’s goal of growing their customer base and expanding outside of the Danish borders, they needed to increase their word-of-mouth. Previously, the team worked off gut feelings to measure customer satisfaction. This meant they never really knew when it was the right time to ask a customer to become an advocate.

To more accurately gauge customer sentiment, the team sent NPS® surveys to new customers after they’d been active in the system for 60 days. After that, they sent a follow-up survey every six months.  Based on the survey scores, they created a playbook to send their promoters (9-10 NPS) requests to review them on Trustpilot.

After implementing this integrated NPS and customer review program, they achieved an overall NPS score of 39. They also saw a significant increase in their ranking on the review site Trustpilot, which was a big win.

Lastly, by setting up automated alerts for low NPS scores, they were able to actively work with customers to quickly turn their frustrations into a positive experience and grow the relationship.

Congratulations to all of the winners of the 2021 ChurnHero awards!