There’s no single blueprint for building what’s next in retention, and this year’s GameChanger winners prove it.
Across EMEA and APAC, teams are rethinking how they fight churn, accelerate adoption, scale customer engagement, and put AI to work. This year’s GameChanger Award winners have each solved a different challenge and raised the bar for what great retention strategies look like.
Here are the 2026 Pulse Europe GameChangers ⭐️
- The Retention Champion: TrendMiner
- The Adoption Accelerator: OVO
- The Digital Architect: Lansweeper
- Customer Success Transformation of the Year: SUSE
- The Intelligent Innovator: Xceptor
- The Rising Star: PVcase
The Retention Champion: TrendMiner
The Retention Champion award recognizes an organization that excels at protecting customer relationships through proactive, thoughtful action.
For TrendMiner, retention isn’t a single moment in the customer journey. It’s a continuous discipline that runs through it. Using Gainsight, they built an end-to-end retention motion, from early base-wide risk detection, to dual-checkpoint renewal forecasting, through to proactive reengagement. By building health scoring specifically for renewals into the Customer Success (CS) team’s daily operating model, TrendMiner gave CSMs visibility into risk long before a renewal conversation ever started.
This intentional and consistent approach resulted in their team being able to operate far ahead of risk. Their save rate on flagged at-risk accounts climbed from 60% in the second half of 2025 to 90% by Q2 2026, with 96.7% of at-risk ARR retained in that same quarter. Net Revenue Retention (NRR) on saved accounts improved by 12.8 percentage points. Best of all, in Q2 2026, every account that churned had already been flagged as at risk in advance. Not a single renewal was lost to a missed signal.
The Adoption Accelerator: OVO
The Adoption Accelerator award celebrates organizations that have transformed onboarding into momentum and product engagement into business growth.
For the past 10 years, OVO has invested in building on Gainsight Community. As a result, they’ve turned their customer forum into something that goes beyond answering support tickets. Their self-service engine gets customers to value without ever needing to pick up the phone. And they can prove it. Using an industry-standard deflection formula, the team can point to hard, verified return on investment (ROI) rather than vanity engagement numbers.
In H1 2026 alone, they estimate that the OVO Forum deflected over 98,300 support contacts, enabling customers to self-serve & reducing demand on their contact centres for simpler enquiries. Beyond deflection, the forum has added additional value to OVO Live, a rewards system for carbon-conscious customers, over the last two years. They’ve also raised the bar for customer communities as a whole, with content so well-indexed that it’s driven a twelvefold increase in readership velocity to campaigns.
The Digital Architect: Lansweeper
The Digital Architect award celebrates organizations that have cracked the code on scaling customer engagement without sacrificing personalization or impact.
In 2025, Lansweeper proved that a fully digital, CTA-driven motion could support thousands of customers without a single dedicated CSM. In 2026, they took it a step further by asking, “Could that same digital model learn which customers mattered most, and go find them first?” Today, just three people on the Digital Success team cover every Starter and Pro customer across EMEA and APAC, with no accounts assigned to any one owner.
Lansweeper has shown how to do all of this at a massive scale, managing 4,518 EMEA and APAC customers with zero dedicated CSMs. Today, 60.1% of all active customers in the region are served exclusively through their digital motion. Going beyond efficiency, this motion is also driving real revenue, managing 33.7% of the region’s total ARR (€17.1M of €50.7M) and closing 346 customers through digital CTAs since April 2025.
Customer Success Transformation of the Year: SUSE
The Customer Success Transformation of the Year award celebrates organizations that have fundamentally transformed how they deliver Customer Success across people, process, and technology.
Starting in 2022 with 30 CSMs operating on intuition and Excel, SUSE rebuilt their entire Customer Success operating model from the ground up. They standardized a repeatable post-sales lifecycle framework, redefined coverage models, and evolved their technology stack into a data-driven platform. Through this transformation, Sales and Executive Leadership are now aligned around shared data and are able to prove, in hard numbers, the commercial value of Customer Success to their C-suite.
In four years, SUSE has significantly grown their managed portfolio, expanding covered accounts by 17% (’22-’24) and 20% (’24-’26). During those same periods, SUSE successfully increased managed ACV by 43% and 24%. CSM-managed accounts post a strong NRR. They’ve also experienced 40% efficiency gains through coverage changes while achieving 90% visibility into their customer base.
The Intelligent Innovator: Xceptor
The Intelligent Innovator award celebrates organizations that have harnessed AI and agentic systems to fundamentally transform post-sales operations.
Xceptor‘s Client Success and Operations team used the power of AI to turn manual, inconsistent work into structured, repeatable workflows. They built a production library of 10+ purpose-built AI Skills, integrated directly into Gainsight CS via Model Context Protocol (MCP). Today, tasks like Timeline logging, preparation for executive business reviews, account intelligence, and onboarding all run through the same AI-assisted process, with a human approval gate before anything is sent back to the system of record.
Embedding AI this deeply into Xceptor’s workflow layer has already delivered significant results. The AI-augmented Cockpit workflow raised 1,090 Risk CTAs automatically resolving 516 of them and flagging the rest for human input. AI also helped the team complete 92 positive relationship activities achieving 190% of target. Every major enterprise escalation this year now runs through the same standardized, AI-assisted intake, and scoring process replacing ad hoc, labor-intensive workflows with a more consistent and scalable approach.
The Rising Star: PVcase
The Rising Star award celebrates an individual or team who achieved extraordinary impact during their first year with a Gainsight product.
PVcase set out to solve one of the hardest problems in early-warning Customer Success: catching churn signals buried in unstructured conversation data without adding an hour of CSM workload. The PVcase team stitched together AI Timeline summaries from Zoom and Google Meet, the AI Cheat Sheet, and the Rules Engine into a six-pillar risk framework that reads every customer conversation automatically and flags risk four to five months before renewal—entirely zero-touch, and in record time. When a risk pattern trips, the Rules Engine raises a CTA linked to the exact meeting summary or Cheat Sheet entry that triggered it, so the CSM acts in minutes rather than investigating for an hour.
Backtested against lost opportunities using a strict four-month lookback, the model flagged roughly 25% of them. This means that for more than a quarter of the deals PVcase lost, a documented warning was sitting in the company’s own data while there was still time to act. The framework is now being weighted directly into PVcase’s health scores, turning what began as an alerting system into the engine behind proactive renewal plays—with a tuning program already underway to sharpen detection further.
Congratulations to Our 2026 Pulse Europe GameChangers!
Every GameChanger started with the question, “What can we do differently?” These seven teams followed that question into new approaches to retention, adoption, scale, and AI, with real results to show for it. Congratulations to our 2026 Pulse Europe GameChangers! We can’t wait to celebrate with you at Pulse Europe and keep exploring what’s next together.
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