2023 Americas Shortlist and Winners
Our nomination period closed on April 14th for the 2023 Americas Customer Success Excellence Awards. Our judges have reviewed all nominations and selected a shortlist that represented the best in customer success. Winners from each category were announced at the Customer Success Excellence awards ceremony in May 2023 in San Francisco.
2023 Americas Winners
Customer Success Leader of the Year
Winner: Ralphie English
Highly Commended: Andrea Galvez
Customer Success Manager of the Year
Winner: Tulasi Ryali
Highly Commended: Nícolas Mendy de Baermaecker
Customer Success Rising Star
Winner: Natalie Priest
Highly Commended: Brittany Milbourne
Best Use of Technology in Customer Success
Winner: Michael Bojanski
Highly Commended: Angela Domenichelli
Most Innovative Customer Success Initiative
Winner: Nick Sanders
Highly Commended: Rachel Orston
Customer Success Leader of the Year
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Ralphette Murphy English
Ralphette English is the VP of CX at Deepgram. She started her career at the North Carolina Department of Revenue as a Data Analyst while completing her undergraduate degree in Computer Information Systems. She also holds a Master’s in Cyber Security and Information Assurance. Ralphie switched to SaaS tech startups, working as a Director of Implementation, then moving to the business side as a Partner Services Manager, Global Customer Success Director, and Head of CS. Originally from Spartanburg, SC, she’s lived in Pasadena, CA for 10+ years and is the mother of 5, ages 6, 7 (twins), 14, and 20.
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Andrea Galvez
Andrea Galvez is the Vice President of Client Success at the Financial Health Network. She designed and now leads the organization’s Client Success Team, made up of industry experts who partner with clients to identify winning strategies, operationalize consumer and employee financial health, and showcase the results of their work. Andrea has committed her career to driving real change for everyday people, with more than 15 years of experience across various nonprofits and membership organizations focused on financial health and justice. She also moderates many important conversations for clients and partners, guiding the tactical work of improving financial health.
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Greg Elliott
A SaaS Executive and Customer Success Leader of over 15 years, and currently the SVP of Customer Experience at Loopio overseeing a global team of 70 people with a passion for team development, innovation, customer ROI and growth. Greg's trademark is innovating the customer journey to create strong success for customers, while cultivating an amazing environment for his teams, and developing world-class leaders, all which produce top level business results. In addition, Greg loves to give back to the CS community by providing mentorship to people looking to break into the industry and first time CS leaders.
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Daniel Coullet
Born 50 miles south of Paris, Daniel is passionate about people, culture, leadership and innovation. He excels in change management and transition, when times are tough and outcomes are uncertain, he strongly believes that by leading with a positive, open mind and innovative thinking, people can achieve the impossible. Daniel is uniquely adept at cultural diversity, his work across multinational geographies coupled with his deep experience in customer success and customer experience enable him to create and deliver high value solutions to clients and comprehensive strategies to his teams. Daniel holds an Executive MBA, HEC Paris and Master of Science.
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Christine Boermeester
Christine Boermeester is Senior Director of Customer Success at Deltek. She’s a champion for exceptional customer experience with deep expertise in building global customer success teams. In her twenty+ years at Deltek, she has been an advocate for customers and collaborating cross-functionally, and a founding member of Women@Deltek, an employee resource group to build a community where women are empowered. She believes that proactively nurturing customer relationships, being easy to do business with, and supporting and developing her employees will elevate the customer and employee experience and lead to increased growth.
Customer Success Manager of the Year
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Wayne Augustine
As a Customer Success Executive at Cisco with over ten years of experience, Wayne champions customers’ priorities and initiatives to deliver business value and outcomes. Wayne holds a BS in Industrial and Systems Engineering, an MS in Health Informatics, and is a PMI-certified Project Manager. He has a Digital Transformation of Healthcare certificate from Columbia and is pursuing an MBA at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. Wayne is committed to philanthropy and mentoring. He enjoys family, fishing, golf, and Steelers football in his spare time. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, Christy, and children, Sirvaad and Xayah.
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Sabrina Perpetua
Sabrina Perpetua’s international upbringing in Argentina, Germany, and Colombia ignited her love for new cultures and languages. Though her academic background is in Public Relations, Sabrina’s early career in Sales helped her develop a keen sense of the importance of NRR and expansion, skills she carried over when she transitioned to Customer Success in 2016. With a focus on combining customer growth with a great customer experience, she is a valuable member of the Planhat team. Besides her work with Planhat and the customer success community, Sabrina takes pride in being a dedicated mother to her two young children.
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Tulasi Ryali
Tulasi Ryali is a senior CSM at Siemens, with over 18 years of experience in customer facing roles, with the last four years in customer success roles at Siemens for SaaS Products. She has master’s degree in computer aided design and manufacturing and bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. Tulasi is the Customer loyalty and advocacy owner for Siemens Xcelerator portfolio. Her focus on customer success led her to adopt a pan-America strategy and focus on measuring customer investment score. She differentiated herself by using measurable metrics for customer satisfaction. She presents in internal and external conferences.
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Nicolas Mendy de Baeremaecker
I live in Brazil, but I'm Uruguayan. Where I have a family (wife and two children) My path has always been in the direction of an empathetic relationship with other human beings and this has not always been well accepted in other jobs, since money often came first. Working as a CSM, I feel in my rightful place. In the professional place I was born to occupy. My desire is to become a professional who teaches people to apply empathy in their routine.
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Kade Smith
Kade has been working in Customer Success for over eight years. He has worked at companies such as Apple, Instructure, Tubemogul, and currently has put roots down at Zego. He has a passion for the products, clients, and people he works with everyday. He recently received the opportunity to create his own role of Customer Success Enablement Specialist to empower all Zego's customers. Outside of work, he enjoys singing, cooking, going to the beach, being with family, spending time with his partner Chris, and traveling to all corners of the globe.
Customer Success Rising Star
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Anneke McCabe
Anneke McCabe is a Senior Customer Success Manager at Seeq Corporation. Anneke has a B.S. degree in Materials Engineering from Virginia Tech, coming to Seeq from US Gypsum. Her role while there focused on tackling process manufacturing challenges in the areas of safety, productivity, reliability, quality, sustainability, and Lean Manufacturing initiatives. She enjoys bringing her process manufacturing experience to both understanding and delivering upon her Seeq customers’ analytics needs and digital transformation goals. Anneke lives in the Virginia Beach, VA area with her husband who serves in the Navy, three children and two dogs!
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Brittany Milbourne
Brittany is currently a Customer Success Manager at Clockwise, a calendar management SaaS start-up. She was the 4th hire on their Customer Success team. Prior to this role, she spent 8 years in corporate retail as a brand manager and product developer for several well-known international beauty and apparel companies. Shortly after transitioning into tech and joining Clockwise as a Scaled CSM, she created the role of Growth Customer Success Manager for herself, after identifying a need to help nurture and identify expansion opportunities within a subset of higher ARR Scaled customers. She is passionate about building champions and ensuring her customers have an exceptional experience. She is also the Women of Clockwise ERG lead and a previous guest speaker at GirlStart. Originally from Philadelphia, PA she currently lives in Dallas, TX. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with friends and family, working out, and traveling all over the world.
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Natalie Priest
My role as Senior Customer Success Manager with SpacesEDU by myBlueprint combines two of my passions: teaching and educational technology. I am responsible for onboarding, implementation, adoption, expansion and renewal efforts, and do so by fostering relationships with district leadership teams and being the voice of the customer in our organization. I take great pride in equipping educators with the confidence to meaningfully implement digital documentation and assessment in their practice. I have my Master of Arts in Educational Technology, and this has had a profound impact on my teaching career of 12 years and my current position with SpacesEDU.
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Menard Dacono
Menard has been with Moody's Analytics since 2012. He started off as a Business Development Manager in Bureau van Dijk Singapore (before Moody's acquisition) and he moved to the US in 2018 as an expatriate and held the same position but assigned to West Coast accounts in the US, selling data solutions to the academics, FI and PS sectors. He joined the CSM team in June 2021 and continues to manage strategic Government/Professional Services clients. He has an Executive MBA degree from Rutgers University and a Postgraduate Diploma for Transfer Pricing from Middlesex University (UK).
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Meghan Richardson
Meghan Richardson is currently a Success Programs Manager for U.S. Public Sector customers based in the Pacific Northwest at Cisco Systems. Prior to this role, she was in the Customer Experience organization with Cisco in Renewal Management. Meghan first came to Cisco in late 2000 and has found her best fit with the Customer Success Organization where her empathetic skills and ability to anticipate the needs of her customers has been invaluable. In addition to her experience with Cisco, Meghan worked in the Music Industry in Artist Management & Tour Marketing for Nettwerk Music Group. Meghan is originally from the Bay Area in California and is based in Portland, Oregon.
Best Use of Technology in Customer Success
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Michael Bojanski
Michael Bojanski, Learn to Win's Director of Customer Support Operations, previously managed teams of 100+ in retail/warehouse at Amazon and supervised internal operations at Atlantis. While pursuing his MBA at Darden, he worked part-time at Learn to Win as Director of Finance/Marketing before joining full-time in his current role. He is passionate about problem solving, entrepreneurship, and building communities, and he lives in Durham, NC with his wife Rachel.
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Angela Domenichelli
Angela has worked at athenahealth since 2013 and has spent the last 5 years as a Customer Success Operations Manager. She is passionate about deeply understanding stakeholders pain points and inventing creative solutions with verified measures of success.
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Branden Maue and Peter Adams
Branden Maue, Community Manager at ChurnZero, brings creativity and empowerment to the ChurnZero Community. He believes that everyone has something to share, and wants to help them share it. Branden has been in SaaS since 2019 and wouldn't want to work in any other field.
Peter Adams, Team Lead, Customer Enablement at ChurnZero, brings enthusiasm and engagement to adult learning experiences, believing competence creates confidence. Peter has worked in customer education since 2013; his passion for people and technology drives his desire to provide unparalleled learning and collaborative experiences through data-driven insights.
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Stephanie Chan
Stephanie Chan is the CSM Excellence Manager at Seeq, responsible for establishing and implementing best practices for the team and managing the Essentials portfolio of customers. Chan has approximately 15 years of experience in Oil and Gas covering roles in the downstream, midstream, upstream, corporate planning and environmental services. Her industry and project management experience has established her commitment to learning and evolution. Chan holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Calgary. Outside of the office she lives a sweaty busy life in Canada with young twins and “speed exercising” with CrossFit.
Most Innovative Customer Success Initiative
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Deepak Paripati
Passionate about driving business value & outcomes for my customers. I have been in implementation, consulting and customer success roles in startups, scale-ups and MNCs as a team player and a leader enabling teams. With more than 12 years of experience, I have built my key strengths as being empathetic, thinking analytical, understanding technology and working cross-functional. I am an Engineer at brain, with data in hand and Customer at heart. Started my career as an engineer, and transformed into a business role through MBA and experience building a startup. I sincerely believe in 'Learn, Unlearn and Relearn'.
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Nick Sanders
I lead teams that help customer success organizations scale responsibly by enhancing the customer experience via digital tools. I get fulfillment out of freeing up professionals to do what they do best by providing technology that reduces customers time to value, increases overall satisfaction, and automates key milestones in the customer journey.
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Andrew Glendon
I have a passion for customer success, marketing strategy, brand management, integrated marketing communications, sales and marketing research. I have experience in the tech start-up and SaaS space specifically in Business Development, Sales and Customer Success. I'm currently working as a Customer Success Manager at RouteThis.
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Rachel Orston
Rachel leads SmartRecruiter’s global post-sales teams and is responsible for our overall customer experience. She was previously Chief Customer Officer at BetterCloud, which received a majority investment from Vista Equity in 2022. Over the last decade, Rachel has scaled growth at every stage, from $1M to $1B+, leading post-sales teams inside companies small and large. She is an investor and founding member of CS Angel and is also a member of CHIEF. Rachel received her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and her MBA from Georgia Tech.