SAN FRANCISCO, May 19, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --  Gainsight announced the winners of its 2023 GameChanger awards on the keynote stage at Pulse, the company’s annual industry conference in San Francisco. The awards celebrate companies and individuals who have made significant contributions to the field of customer success, driving innovation and transforming the way businesses engage with their customers.

The winners of the 2023 Gainsight GameChanger Awards are as follows:

The Digital Customer Success Disruptor: Alteryx, Samsara, and SAP Concur, and are the winners of The Digital Customer Success (DCS) Disruptor award for their pioneering work in moving into the next era of customer success. These champions of efficiency combine the strengths of digital experiences and human expertise to power healthy customer life cycles at scale. As a result, their companies reap the rewards of stronger product adoption and customer retention.

• Samsara’s Scaled team oversees a data-driven and mostly automated customer journey for their long-tail of low ACV customers across all stages of the customer lifecycle. Over the last year, the team has achieved a 21% YoY increase in customers that successfully onboarded in the first 30 days of their contract, a 37% YoY increase in the number of business reviews completed, and seen an improvement in their CSAT scores from 4.2 to >4.5.
  
  
• SAP Concur’s Global Digital Enterprise Customer Success Team used an end-to-end Adopt, Consume, and Expand digital motion across the customer lifecycle to achieve unprecedented YoY durable growth and record retention.
  
  
• Alteryx’s Digital Customer Success strategy aimed to improve customer experience, increase retention and enable proactive support for all customers. As a result of Digital Customer Success, Alteryx has been able to identify potential issues or roadblocks before they become major problems and automatically attach tailored success plans and CTAs across 8,000+ accounts. The company has seen significant increases in renewal rates in accounts with digital success programs and in Digital Customer Success Manager to Account ratios, and meaningfully reduced hours spent per CSM through automating communications to thousands of end user.

The Architect: Unqork is the winner of The Architect award which is given to the company that thinks outside the box when it comes to building the best community for its users. Not only did they build a community that is helpful across the entire customer journey, but they also scaled the process of creating personal 1-on-1 relationships with their customers.

• In FY’23, the company wanted to scale the Unqork Community Hub after migrating their support Q&A from their previous vendor to Gainsight. They found innovative ways to do more with less and achieve scale by improving community engagement. The result was a >25% increase in MAUs QoQ with on average ~95% recurring active visits and ~25% actively engaging through posts, likes, upvotes, etc. Their number of Subject Matter Expert superusers increased 162% from 13 to 34 and answers provided by external users increased 22% to >80% YoY reducing the demand for internal experts.
  

The Challenger: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is the winner of The Challenger award for their commitment to challenging the status quo and driving change in the industry. The organization has not only risen to the occasion to take on unforeseen challenges but found solutions to thrive with an uncompromising dedication to the success of the individuals in their organization, their customer base, or their community.

• HMH transformed from a traditional publishing company to a learning technology company. By adopting Gainsight, the CS team has been able to provide clear metrics and milestone reporting to their executive team, customer feedback to their product team, and set clear goals for their CSMs .
  

The Defender: Zendesk is the winner of The Defender award which recognizes the company that used Gainsight to identify areas of potential risk to the business in order to increase product adoption, improve retention, accelerate expansion, and decrease churn.

• Zendesk wanted to improve their customer engagement and ability to identify and take action on customer risk and expansion opportunities. The company operationalized its playbooks within Gainsight and saw a nearly 5x increase in Business Reviews and Kick Off engagements.
  

The Dream Team: Blackbaud, Inc. is the winner of The Dream Team award which recognizes how members of an organization bring together teams like Customer Success, Sales, Product, and Marketing to create deeper customer relationships.

• Blackbaud wanted to ensure alignment between customer expectations and outcomes to help improve customer satisfaction and reduce retention risk. The company decided to transform the way they captured custom outcomes via their new Outcomes Management Framework to align with customer priorities as well as internally align across departments. The team’s efforts have resulted in delivering excellent customer success, wowing customers, and ensuring that they achieve their desired outcomes. As a result, Blackbaud has improved retention, created more customer champions, and expanded their customers’ use of their solutions.
  

The Experience Maker: Mindbody is the winner of The Experience Maker award which honors an organization that is hyper-focused on improving the experience of their customers and personalizing relationships at scale.

• In 2022, Mindbody adopted a digital customer success strategy to improve the customer experience for its SMB and mid-market customers. The strategy has been implemented on 3k customers since inception and has increased their implementation booking rate from ~35% to a whopping 84%. The initiative has also resulted in the launch of more than 40 customer journeys and sent nearly 20k emails with an average open rate of 77%.
  

Transformational Leader: Mike Dover, VP of Customer Success at Certinia (formerly FinancialForce), is the winner of the Transformational Leader award which is given to a person who has driven material change in their organization by transforming customer success and product experience into a key driver of growth by leveraging Gainsight.

• When Dover joined Certinia, the company was faced with a churn rate of 13%. He realized that process inefficiencies were leading to poor customer experiences which in turn led to churn. Dover sought direct customer feedback, launched new segments, introduced a digital motion, built a brand-new renewals team, and ultimately transformed how the team thought about Customer Success. As a direct result of the process changes, the company’s churn rate has plummeted to 6%.
  

The Visionary: Sendbird is the winner of The Visionary award which is given to an organization that understands the value of a unified view of their customer data. They have mastered using 360º views, scorecards, and advanced reporting to shift their teams from a reactive to a more proactive approach.

• Sendbird wanted to mature Customer Success from a scrappy, troubleshooting-focused team to a global group of proactive thought partners who could support customer growth while setting up the company to scale. As a result of their 2022 Customer Success Roadmap, the company was able to maintain their renewal rate, improve CSAT satisfaction rate by 5%, ensure 80% of ARR is covered by a CSP, launch an automated newsletter with an open rate of nearly 40%, and improve visibility into the customer’s onboarding journey to identify risk.
  

"We are thrilled to recognize these trailblazing companies and individuals for their amazing contributions to the evolution of customer success," said Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight. "These pioneers understand the value of customer success in driving efficient growth and are defining the benchmarks for success in our industry. Congratulations to all of the winners!"

About Pulse

Pulse is the industry’s largest conference on customer success, held at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event draws thousands of customers, practitioners, and experts in the fields of customer success, product management, and community. This year’s title sponsors include Thena, Rocketlane, and GuideCX. To learn more, visit gainsightpulse.com/2023.

About Gainsight
Gainsight’s innovative platform helps companies of all sizes and industries drive durable growth through customer-led, product-led, and community-led strategies. It offers a powerful set of customer success, product experience, and community engagement solutions that together enable businesses to scale efficiently, create alignment, and put the customer at the heart of innovation. With Gainsight, it’s never been easier to drive acquisition, increase product adoption, prevent churn, and grow with renewals and expansion. Learn how leading companies such as GE Digital, SAP Concur, and Box use Gainsight at www.gainsight.com.

Contact:
Jordan Sher
Vice President, Corporate and Brand Marketing
jsher@gainsight.com