At FinDock, we attach great value to customer and partner support. Aiming to help customers achieve long-term success, our Customer Success Team goes the extra mile for customers and partners alike.
How does the team go about it? What’s its vision on support? And what makes FinDock’s support unique? Chris Boxall and Wouter van Leeuwen, who both work on the Customer Success Team, provide a behind-the-scenes look.
“We go as much in-depth as we can”
“Our ultimate goal is to make partners and customers successful,” says Wouter, who joined FinDock a year and a half ago. “A smooth go-live is essential in this respect. So, we pay a lot of attention to the implementation phase. Once customers have signed up for FinDock, we start the onboarding process. It’s important for us to really get to know the customer and the partner they work with. We want to learn more about their needs and objectives, as well as the project’s scope and timeline. This helps us to give the right guidance and support, and also being able to respond quickly to questions.”
Most of the time, the Customer Success Team schedules an onboarding call to discuss these things. Partners happily accept the comprehensive support FinDock’s well-versed, highly qualified team offers. Partners that have already completed other projects with FinDock can start the project without the onboarding call. In these cases, the Customer Success Team ensures that the customer and the partner can access all available documentation and know where to turn to for support.
“We aren’t just support agents who only give short, simple, FinDock-related answers,” says Chris, who has been with FinDock for two years. “We go as much in-depth as we can. We ultimately want everyone to be happy with FinDock. That’s reflected throughout the company. Our Customer Success Team is only good because everyone at FinDock cares about our customers’ success.”
“We want partners and customers to hit the ground running”
At FinDock, support takes several forms. Wouter explains, “We train partners and customers to work with the product and sometimes teach them on the job. We want them to gain a thorough understanding of FinDock, so they can hit the ground running after the implementation phase.”
“Our approach is to go beyond solving an issue or answering a question,” says Hartger Olivier, VP of customer success and operations. “We believe in an old adage that goes, ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.’”
Customers and partners can expect to go through five steps with FinDock’s Customer Success Team. After signing the contract (1), they either schedule an onboarding call or study FinDock’s comprehensive materials (including documents and videos) to prepare for what’s next (2). Then, implementation starts, which includes project engagement and, if required, additional expert services (3). During go-live (4), the team is on standby to help the partner ensure everything goes smoothly. After that, both the customer and the partner can count on ongoing customer engagement and support (5). The team tracks the customer’s use of the product and intervenes if things don’t go as expected.
If an implementation is complex, the Implementation Success Package ensures customers and partners receive proper guidance. “It means partners have one contact at FinDock they can reach out to throughout the implementation,” says Wouter. “This person knows everything about the project and helps shorten the time between signing the contract and going live with the solution.”
“We wear different hats and adapt where needed”
The Customer Success Team ensures that customers and partners achieve success with FinDock by providing advice on how to implement certain requirements and how to run a project. But what happens once a customer actively uses FinDock? Then, they’re entitled to support as part of their license, which is also provided by the Customer Success Team. Here’s why: at this point, the team is highly familiar with the partner, customer, and implementation, so it can quickly resolve any technical issues.
But the Customer Success Team often goes beyond what’s required and expected. Chris explains:
“Obviously, we’ll solve any FinDock-related issues. But sometimes an error in another system affects the customer’s use of FinDock. Rather than just telling the customer that, we’ll usually investigate it. Although we can’t solve a problem which occurs in a system that’s not ours, we will try and identify what’s wrong. That way, we can point the customer in the right direction.”
However, support is not always about solving incidents. “If a customer raises a support case and there’s a feature that can help them, we’ll point it out,” says Chris. “We’re tapping into a rich source of knowledge. FinDock and Salesforce hold no secrets to us. On top of that, we understand the business side of things, since lots of us have worked in it prior to joining FinDock.”
Wouter adds, “Sometimes customers request that we look into new solutions because they are dealing with new scenarios.” Several partners, for example, have asked FinDock to help build intelligent rules to facilitate bank statement reconciliation. Chris explains, “When partners come to us with specific use cases like these, we’ll work with them to find a solution. We wear different hats and adapt where needed.”
“We work with customers so they can maximize the solution’s value”
In its quest to help customers achieve success, the team finds it crucial to truly listen to any issues and questions they bring up. “Every two weeks, the Customer Success Team and the Product Team sit down to discuss these and decide which ones we’ll tackle first,” says Chris. He has observed that many customers don’t really expect tech companies to respond to their feedback. “We actually care and want to act upon it whenever we can. As some AppExchange reviews point out, they’re not used to that.”
Members of FinDock’s Customer Success Team also act as consultants. Wouter says, “The partner is in the lead, but we can provide advice where needed.” Chris provides an example:
“In recent months, we’ve joined forces with an SI partner to help lots of their customers get the most out of FinDock. We saw that one customer would really benefit from adjusting their processes. Together with the SI partner, we’ve helped them understand that and make the necessary changes. That’s just one example of how we help partners take away some of a project’s complexity and support them in making it successful.”
By going the extra mile, the Customer Success Team wants customers to leverage their FinDock contract from the get-go as support is part of the subscription fee. Chris says, “We work with them from the very start, so they can maximize the solution’s value in the short term and in the long term.”
Our Customer Success Team has a long track record of successfully assisting a variety of customers. You can find some of their stories covered in more detail in our Customer stories page.