Customer Success Team Profile: FloQast

Quick Stats:

Web: www.floqast.com                      Industry: Software                  Location: Los Angeles, CA

Meet FloQast, a software company that provides close management software for corporate accounting departments to help them improve the way businesses close their books each month. FloQast’s growing Customer Success Team is comprised of 31 CS professionals who lead the setup/implementation, Customer Success and support functions of their business.

Read on to learn what Sana Farooq, Customer Success Operations Manager at Floqast, shared about how they the team keeps customers at the center of what they do despite their tremendous growth.  

Q. How is your Customer Success Management Team organized?
A. Our Customer Success Managers are a team of ten, broken out into three different segments: Strategic, Standard, and Tech Touch. This has allowed us to operate within sub-teams and provide more targeted service to our customers, address unique challenges that appear for specific cohorts, and provide more leadership opportunities internally for CSM’s to take ownership of their segment, run sub-team meetings, and execute on projects specific to their team.

Q. How do you encourage customer centricity across your entire organization?
A. A customer centric culture really starts from the top. Our leadership team values customer-centric thinking across the board, and within every function - including sales, product and engineering, and marketing. You’ll never attend a cross-functional meeting that doesn’t have the word “customer” plastered all over it. This allows our CSMs to remain autonomous in the level of service they’re able to provide to customers, while also knowing that they will be supported in their decisions.

We celebrate our customers (aka FloFam) internally just as much as we do externally- we celebrate when they raise a round of funding, send them a FloQast onesie when they have a baby, and provide them resources for their new role when they receive a promotion. 

Customers are truly at the center of everything we do and it’s awesome to work at a company that really walks the walk - it’s the ideal environment for any client facing person at FloQast.

Q. What types of hires have you found most beneficial? Have you noticed any positive correlations with past roles, industries or backgrounds?
A. Our team has tripled in size in just the last two years, with no plans of slowing down just yet. While we have found that former CSM experience at a SaaS company allows a new hire to ramp quickly and hit the ground running, it’s much more important to us that we preserve our customer centric culture first and foremost. We look for qualities that are outside of the job description such as empathy, emotional intelligence, personal responsibility, and curiosity. 

Tailoring our interview process to match those qualities, allows us to connect more deeply with candidates and see what really drives them as people - there are lots of highly qualified people that can “do” the job, but are you really passionate about helping, teaching, and understanding our customer’s process? Those are the people we want on our team!

Q. What moment(s) makes you most proud of your team?
A. The moments that make me most proud of our team are when we receive personalized emails from our customers, that go out of their way to tell us how impressed they were with our level of service. We also receive pictures of our customers’ children covered in FloQast stickers, rocking FQ swag, and even had a customer send his CSM a photo of himself wearing his FloQast shirt on the day he first held his newborn baby in the hospital! We have incredible superfans in our customer base, and being a part of these stories with them is what makes us all so proud to work here.

Q. What ChurnZero features have you found most beneficial for your team? Why?
A. Segmented Churn Scores, by far! Prior to ChurnZero, we were limited to reporting subjective health scores within Salesforce, primarily based on CSM sentiment. ChurnZero has allowed us to build out eight different Churn Scores based on segments, premium features, and more. Each of those scores allow us to go deep within the criteria as well, and customize them based on cohort- encompassing everything from number of support tickets submitted, to user behavior within the app, as well as things specific to only the first year Journey such as implementation time. CSM’s now have a much more detailed view into a customer’s health, and can be more prescriptive heading into QBR’s and optimization calls.

Q. In what ways has ChurnZero empowered your team to do their job?
A. ChurnZero’s Slack Alerts and Live Exports have helped enable our managers to be more proactive in overseeing the team, in areas that were previously considered blind spots. We are able to receive notifications if a customer hasn’t received any communication past a threshold or if a Churn Score suddenly spikes, and review action plans for unresponsive customers during 1x1’s. It gives us valuable data in real time, instead of having to spend hours sifting through data and reports just to narrow down the areas we’d like to discuss with team members during meetings.

Would your company like to be profiled in an upcoming Customer Success Team profile? Email Holly Keener at hkeener@churnzero.net for more information.