Six plays, proven in the field

The situation. Vanessa joined as the first CSM for SnapPay, a B2B payments product inside Fiserv's Carat division. There was no customer success function: no journey map, no playbooks, no way to know how customers actually felt.

What she did. Her first move was measurement, not messaging. She launched SnapPay's first NPS survey and the baseline came back at -25. Instead of treating that as bad news to manage, she used it as the founding document of the CS function. She triaged a book of 300+ accounts into tiers (Tier 1 high touch, Tier 2 low touch, Tier 3 tech touch), built the journey framework and business review templates from scratch, and started a monthly Voice of the Customer meeting with senior stakeholders so NPS feedback turned into prioritized fixes across support, implementation, and product.

What happened. She supported over $53M in ARR while the function was still being built, and project managed SnapPay's first knowledge base and FAQ, with videos, articles, and gifs tailored to each user type.

The situation. At TruePlan, onboarding leaned on live, one off training sessions. It did not scale, and the same questions kept arriving as support tickets.

What she did. Vanessa produced more than 7 onboarding and training videos so customers could learn the product on their own time, and built a per client playbook with personalized success plans and a full year of high touch checkpoints. Alongside the Director of Customer Success, she designed a Customer Health Score algorithm that blended quantitative usage signals with qualitative judgment, so the team could see risk forming instead of discovering it at renewal.

What happened. Support tickets dropped 12% month over month. She also started a weekly Voice of the Customer call and Slack channel that pulled engineering, product, marketing, CS, and design into one room to prioritize the roadmap.

The situation. Ahead of forecasted market softness, Vanessa saw churn risk coming while there was still time to prepare. She owned 47 clients ranging from $15k to $125k ACV.

What she did. She wrote and rolled out escalation, win back, and churn playbooks across account management, customer experience, and sales, so a wobbling account triggered a shared response instead of improvisation. She also launched a monthly customer newsletter covering product updates and retraining, keeping the value conversation alive between touchpoints.

What happened. Two churned customers were won back within 45 days. The newsletter hit 45%+ open rates and a 22% click to open rate, numbers most marketing teams would take for a campaign, let alone a retention motion.

The situation. Vanessa owned the 23 largest enterprise clients, each over $50k ACV. Business reviews mattered enormously at that tier, but every EBR deck cost about an hour of manual assembly, and one off training sessions were eating up to 40% of each CSM's weekly calendar.

What she did. She rebuilt the EBR as a Mode dashboard wired with SQL, so decks refreshed themselves with current data. She replaced the one off trainings with scalable webinars for all client stakeholders. And she built EliseAI's customer journey map by gathering input from customer success, support, implementation, sales, and marketing, because a journey map only one team believes in is a poster, not a tool.

What happened. Deck prep time fell by over 28%, from about an hour to 43 minutes, and CSMs got their calendars back for actual customer work. Renewal and upsell plans for her book were built jointly with the account executive.

The situation. As Americas Customer Success Team Lead with 3 direct reports, Vanessa was responsible for a regional book of business that, in her earlier CSM years there, had meant over $14.7M in ACV across roughly 140 clients spanning FAANG, consumer, service provider, and SaaS.

What she did. She wrote new regional playbooks for onboarding, retention, and churn risk, then hired, trained, and led the team that ran them. The point of the playbooks was consistency: every client got the same quality of onboarding and the same early response to risk, regardless of which CSM held the account. She had introduced NPS to the US team years earlier, so the impact was measurable.

What happened. NPS rose 15% and retention moved from 83% to 87% in a single year. Client marketing campaigns she ran across the team lifted web views 12%.

The situation. At Hubflo, Vanessa leads end to end onboarding and implementation for new clients, managing SaaS integrations across Zapier, Stripe, Xero, and Calendly while partnering with product, support, and sales to keep delivery unblocked.

What she did. Implementation tracking was the weakest link: clients could not see where their onboarding stood, and implementation managers juggled milestones across scattered tools. So she vibe coded ImplementHubFlo herself, a client facing and internal tracker where clients get visibility into their implementation and managers get milestones, ownership, progress, and delivery in one place. She also built a Hubflo batch automater that takes CSV data and chains bulk API calls to create contacts, projects, and workspaces in one pass.

What happened. Bulk work that used to mean hours of manual entry now runs in one pass, and clients onboard noticeably faster. The playbook lesson: the best CS operators do not just run the process, they fix it.