Experts of Experience - #3 Nigel Piper: Rethinking Customer Support with Xero’s Nigel Piper

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

​​Discover the future of customer experience with Nigel Piper, as we explore how embracing customer contact can revolutionize business support systems. Join host Lauren Wood on episode #3 of the Experts of Experience podcast as she sat down with Nigel Piper, Executive GM of Customer at Xero who oversees the customer experience of over 3.7 million subscribers worldwide. In this episode, Nigel shares his philosophy of increasing customer contact and how this fosters unparalleled customer and employee satisfaction. He divulges the innovative use of technology like machine learning, personalized video support, and system integration at Xero that empowers both the customer and the support team. Learn how Xero’s leadership balances the growth of their team with technological solutions, their shift from reactive to proactive customer engagement, and the exciting potential of Generative AI in revolutionizing customer service models. Nigel also reveals his approach to leadership, focusing on future-proofing business strategies, and fostering a company culture that emphasizes employee trust and empowerment. Watch the Full Episode on YouTube: youtube.com/@ExpertsofExperienceIf you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to rate our show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Imagine running your business with a trusted advisor who has your success top of mind. That’s what it’s like when you have a Salesforce Success Plan. With the right plan, Salesforce is with you through every stage of your journey — from onboarding, to realizing business outcomes, to driving efficient growth. Learn more about what’s possible on the Salesforce success plan website: http://sfdc.co/SalesforceCustomerSuccess (00:00) Preview(00:31) Who is Nigel Piper?(03:41) Is Increasing Customer Contact Effective?(05:31) Nigel’s Approach to Customer Engagement(07:05) Exploring The Human Side of KPIs(11:13) Personalization at Scale with Machine Learning(17:30) Mastering Video Support(22:53) Is AI The Future of Customer Support?(28:12) Nigel’s Advice for CX Leaders 

I just don't think that's the future of contact centres and support contact areas. I think there's just a better way of doing it. We absolutely need to empower our customers to find the right answer, but it's still about the people. We're looking at ways that we can capture what a customer sees by video, bring that into our support experience, and then maybe even use video as a way to go back to a customer and solve that question. We'll see organisations really try and limit the human growth and look at technology as the first enabler of bringing

personalization into customers. Managing the customer experience for more than 3.7 million subscribers is not an easy task. Now add the fact that those customers are located all across the globe. As the executive general manager of customer experience at Xero, a prominent cloud-based accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses, that's the job that Nigel Piper takes on every day. What I found most interesting about Nigel's approach is that unlike most in the industry, he encourages more contact with customers, not less, to create an incredible experience. On this episode, he and I dig into how he strives to think differently about what it means to serve his customers, as well as the tools and metrics he uses to manage a global

organization. I'm sure you'll walk away with an inspiring new perspective. I know I did. Let's get into it. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Experts of Experience. Today, I have a very exciting guest on the show, Nigel Piper, who's the Executive General Manager of Customer at Xero, who's servicing 3.7 million customers globally. Nigel, so excited to have you here. Please tell us a little bit about your role at Xero and what you do there. Thanks for having me. So I look after the

customer experience at Xero. And so for what that means is I have teams all over the globe that really focuses around the experience that our customers go through. So particularly around setup, getting the most out of using the features and value of Xero, and just really making sure that our small businesses just have much more financial visibility. And so they can really focus on the thing that matters, which is, of course, running their small business. So I have a rather large team around the world based in Wellington, New Zealand, and pretty passionate about the customers that we have and the experience that they have with us. And I'm so excited to hear about how you're approaching customer support at Xero,

because I think it sounds like you've been taking a really interesting approach to it. But first, tell me, you've been at Xero for quite some time. Is that correct? Yeah, I have. I'm coming up to about 11 years at Xero. So I started when we really were in that infinite stage of getting the company going. I came in, we had around 100,000 customers at the time. I had 50 people on my team. And pretty quickly, I realized with the scale of Xero is how do we have to think differently around the experience? We can't just keep adding people as we grew. And so it was really interesting for me to come in at a pretty sort of small beginning and then try to see if I can grow that, but then trying to get that balance between the

people and the technology right. So yeah, long journey, 11 years, been a lot of fun. I loved every minute. That's amazing. And it's something that's, I mean, we're always looking to scale, but I think especially right now, so many leaders are being faced with this doing more with less and really trying to grow businesses while keeping teams lean. I'd love to hear a little bit just about your approach in growing your team at Xero over that time and through the many stages of the business. It's pretty interesting. We always had very, very high growth expectations in terms of where the business could go.

But for me, and a lot of organizations and support areas focus on how do I sort of stop people coming in? How do I sort of use blockers or IVR systems? But for me, it was quite different. I sort of love the idea that customers were contacting us. And so how did I exponentially increase the number of contacts we had from customers while still being- That is crazy. I'm just going to stop you right there because as someone who has built and led client-facing teams, especially customer support teams, it's always, let's reduce contacts. Let's make it so we have less to do with the

customer. And so tell me more about that philosophy because I think it's so important. I'm a big fan about more. Like, you know, we want customers when they're stuck, when they're just started, when they're not sure about something, when they're trying to find a feature or use a feature for the first time. We really want those people to ask lots and lots of more questions. And so I sort of celebrate success with more people asking questions. Now, sure, I've got to deal with that in a really efficient way, but I really feel I can get that balance right. But for me, it's about how I grow the customers asking questions.

I came out of a pretty traditional contact center environment prior to Xero. So very, very different from what I was like there versus what I need to do at Xero. But I just think there's this opportunity to really change how you think about support and customer expectation and really try to keep delivering more and more of that to customers and increase that level of experience and contact.

Yes, sir. And so how then does your team support those customers? They have many customers coming to them, asking questions. Can you tell us a little bit more of what that process looks like on your end and how you are able to support that scalably? Sure. And one of the first things to probably just clarify is Xero was obviously born in the cloud, was born more importantly post-internet. And so what that means is we had this pretty unique opportunity to how do we want to engage with customers so if you think traditional government departments, utility companies, banks, telcos, we were like that because

we were born we were allowed to to deal with customers in a digital way but it also meant that we from an experience point of view can can actually do that in a digital way but you're still going to try and bring that balance of human into that conversation as well. So for us, we don't have a 100 number. We have people that look at content. We spend a lot of time and effort, and I'm sure we'll get into that, about how do we try and make sure that the right information goes to the right customer at the right time? So how does that, wow, that's exactly what I was looking for, moments for our customers come into play. And so for us, we had people using content, and then we backed that up with a really experienced group of people. So when I say experienced, most of the people that I have on my team have an accounting degree knowledge.

And so it means that when someone really is stuck and using our platform, we can actually really talk to them in the way that they would understand. Oh, that's so fascinating. And yeah, I have so many more questions to get into this. But before we get into a little bit more of what you just said, the right person at the right time, what KPIs are you tracking just at a high level? What are the things that are really the key measurements for success for this team? You know, so sure, we look at obviously NPS, we have a CSAT measure, but a lot of our metrics around people, we really want to know our EMPS, our employee promoter score is high, people are developing and in their role. And so we focus a lot on the people element. You know, I'm a big believer that we trust our people to do the right thing and then we get out of their way.

And so how do we actually bring people in, train them, look after them really, really well? But again, zero is a little bit unique. Like we want people to be able to stop and join the company all hands. We want people to stop on a Friday and maybe have a drink with their colleagues that they have been working with for the last week. And so how do we bring that people element into it as much as we possibly can? So, yep, I get the measures around the NPS, but I would say that I focus more on the people side of things rather than the externals. I reckon I can back myself that we can do the external stuff well, but it's still about the people to me. I love to hear that.

You know, it's amazing that you say that because I've always felt that the employee experience, like how can you engage a customer if your employee isn't engaged in their role? Or how can you make a process easier for a customer when the employee is jumping through a million hoops and they're spending a ton of effort just trying to get to that one answer for a customer? We would much rather our people did the right thing for the customer. And so therefore, we don't look at having time or after call work. We really want to focus on the fact that our people did the right thing for the customer. Sure, we want to use content as our first play. We want to make sure that people can find the information quickly. That's what customers tell us that they like. But absolutely, we have people that we just want to do the right thing for a customer. And if you can really empower people to do that, then you find a nice way of making it work. Yeah. It sounds like you've really built a culture of trust as well.

You really trust your employees to do the right thing. I trust my people impeccably. We're pretty relaxed. We have almost flexible start times if people are stuck on the bus or stuck in traffic. It doesn't matter when they come in. We just trust them just to adjust their schedule over the course of the day. We're pretty relaxed about when people want to have a break or just walk around the block, go and grab a cup of coffee, have a chat to the nights. That's still about the people side for us. For sure. For sure. And that's so different from typical call centers, if you will, right? They tend to be very rigid, very structured. You know, you can have a break at this time or you can have a break at this time. And I'm curious to know why you decided to create such a different type of culture.

Like what really inspired that? I came from a pretty traditional contact center background, but I always believed that there was a better way. And so starting from zero, I had this opportunity. Now, sure, because we don't have that 1-800 number coming in, we aren't necessarily tied to that sort of reaction of answering times. And so the way we see it is we want our people to not sit there with a headset on their head. We really want that empowerment of doing the right thing,

like identifying the right customer to reach out to, to talk to. And don't get me wrong, it's not like I don't love telephones. Telephones are great. Outbound telephone calls are fantastic. Inbound calls, I think, is often not required. And so it's about thinking differently, making sure our customers get the information straight away. So the culture sign, I always believed there was a better way.

I think sometimes contact centres are pigeonholed or treated differently from other parts of the organisation, and I've never been sure why that is the case. Everybody seems to want to know what a having time is or how many calls somebody made, but I just don't think that's the future of contact centers and support contact areas. I think there's just a better way of doing it where we absolutely need to empower our customers to find the right answer, but it's still about the people.

Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful. So tell me a little bit more about the personalization of the content you were saying, getting the right information to the right people at the right time. I'd love to understand kind of how you're approaching that and then also like what tools you're using in order to actually achieve that. Yeah, sure.

So we believe that we had a content-first approach. And so for us, we've been certainly in the machine learning AI space for a while now. And we truly believe that we have signals from our customers. We know our customers. We know where they are. We know what they should really be doing. Accounting tends to suit that.

We know when compliance comes on, when people need to generate their payroll, send an invoice, match their payments that come in. And so for us, it was, can we use some of those triggers to be a little bit better? And so when somebody asked the question that they're stuck on, well, it's pretty normal that we've asked that question before. We know the best answer to give that customer. We can bring personalization based on region or where they come from, what type of customer they are, what we know that they use or don't use.

So we can tailor the content based on how they ask the question, as long as they're obviously in an authenticated state. And so for us, we actually use the power of AI for a number of years to really give that personalization. And we want it to feel quite natural. So as somebody asks a question, the content that we populate is that, again, that, wow, that's exactly what I was looking for moment.

And we've been really successful at getting the right content to the right person straight away. And then over time and more recently, we've been starting to play, of course, like everybody else is in the Gen AI space. And so how do we actually use all of those content sources to actually really come together and give a really practical answer to somebody that's asked a question so again maybe not even having to look at different content sources how do we actually group that together and provide an answer to a customer again just as they need it is it i mean as a customer who has dealt with many different varieties of what you were explaining, it's always such a beautiful, wonderful surprise when I'm like, oh, you know what I need in this moment. I love you so much more. That's great. that you have where you actually have your people reaching out to customers when the customer needs it. How do you ensure that the internal team has the information that they need to deal with all those different scenarios that they may be facing? Yeah. So again, it's all about data and

how do we actually populate in a way. We know, again, customers should be doing particular things or certain things at certain times. and so we look for opportunities to try and proactively reach out to customers so I think the interesting thing is is sort of contact centers and contact support areas are actually changing and if you take away sales and collections you know most places that traditionally have been quite reactive they wait for somebody to raise a question or a query or help that they need but I think that's starting to really change and there's been a lot more now outbound engagement and sort of proactive engagement with customers so for us for example if somebody's recently started a trial it gives

us a fantastic opportunity to reach out to them make sure they're setting up well it's such an important thing that they set up their as their organization in the right way so we'll reach out to them ask them how they're getting on if they want any help if now's the right time and so we can find simple opportunities like that if we know somebody could be using a particular feature then we'll look at opportunities to say hey is there something that we can help you with? So there's lots of little triggers that we have. People love the outbound experience. People love getting a call from Xero and asking. It's a challenge still in terms of, hey, what do you want?

Are you trying to sell me something? But I'm a great believer that you just go into it with this belief that you're doing the right thing for a customer as much as you possibly can. 100%. And I can also see how that's so beneficial for the team as well, because it's like you get a ticket and now it's a race against the clock to figure out how to respond to it. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. It's tiresome. Yeah, and it's interesting. So we're playing with

video at the moment. I'm a great fan of video and the power of that. I know we've all used the team viewers of the world and lots of other things, particularly over COVID time, but we're looking at ways that we can capture what a customer sees by video, bring that into our support experience, and then maybe even use video as a way to go back to a customer and solve that question. And of course, it doesn't have to be as polished as your marketing video. It can be a little bit more basic. But customers love that personalization,

that I'm getting a personalized video back of something that I'm stuck with. And so if it's something they couldn't replicate, that they're seeing on the screen, if they're not quite sure how to explain what the issue is, I just see this great opportunity of using video to try and capture that. And so that's a relatively new thing for us. We've been doing that now for about a few months,

but we see a lovely feature is video and really having that personalized engagement as much as we possibly can. Sometimes people just need to have someone show them exactly what to click. And I can imagine that that is so, so helpful for your customers and your team. And any software is always a little bit challenging getting going. And so how do we actually help them find, be more comfortable, again, unlocking the value of the features of Xero and maximize what they can out of the product. So it's a lot of fun for our people to engage with customers in that way. Yeah, that's great.

And so tell me a little bit about the technology that you're using in order to really provide this personalized content experience and also being able to respond to that customer's individualized needs. We've come a long way in the last 10 years, and I'm sure many others have as well. And look, when Xero started all those years ago, it was a homebrew. We built our own ticketing system. We had some pretty basic technology at the time. And over the last 10 years that I've been at Xero, we've become and really sort of focused on our functions and our back office work. So we're now a Salesforce shop. I'm sure many of the listeners are as well.

So we use a full suite of Salesforce. We've complemented that with a solution called Caveo, which is effectively a language and a search and recommendation engine. So that's been really instrumental in us making sure that we get the right content to the right people at the right time. Particularly when I touched on the Gen AI work we're doing, Caveo has been a big partner of us.

That's also an out-of-the-head look at video through a company called ScreenMeet, which has been really powerful for such an early stage of that. And so the technology has been complemented with other people around the world who are just world-class and doing amazing things. And so we've complemented that into our Salesforce suite. Oh, amazing.

I mean, and that's great because it sounds like you have everything kind of working together. And I'm sure there's many people listening who have been, you know, hacking, hacking together different systems to make them speak to each other. And's complimentary. We've done a good job of at least making sure that we don't have a Frankenstein set up. We really focused on the number of clicks our people had to make through the different solutions and so it became a really easy thing to use. A lot of it of course is complimentary to Salesforce so it can sit within the service cloud module. We use a lot of community experience cloud now to deliver, again, that experience. So we're looking to use things in a slightly different way, but it's very, very complementary and made a real big difference to the way that we operate, the efficiency that we can generate, and therefore the experience that our customers have. And so when you were implementing this, I just want to double click on the number of clicks that your employees had to make. Like, tell me a little bit more about like tracking that if, if you can, just because I think it's something that, you know, is a complicated thing for

companies to figure out how to do. That's, that's exactly what we did. We tracked it and we had team that actually took through a process and looked at the number of clicks that they needed to make in order to be able to give the information to a customer. And we found that pretty unacceptable. And we just felt that there was a better way of doing things. And so we actually had process improvement teams that really focused on the experience. We cleaned up a lot of the technology that made the click rate just that much smaller. It's something that we're still conscious about today.

Everything that we're putting in, does it complicate things? Does it make it too hard to find the information? Is it on screen two rather than screen one? And so how do we actually make sure we bring that together in a pretty simplified way? And clicks are a big part of it. It doesn't seem like a big part of it, but again, we want our people to have a fantastic experience using the technology, that they see the power of technology. And so it's important that we get that bit right. For sure. So as you're sitting in the role that you are, I'm sure you're looking ahead just as much as you're looking towards what the team is doing today.

What are some of the things and especially perhaps technologies that you're excited about in the future of kind of how we can support our customers? Yeah, look, we're a fantastic face. Like, I've probably never been excited in terms of what the opportunities are in the future from where we've come from. Like everybody else that played with GPT when it first came out and, you know, it wrote a lovely poem. But the power of what we're seeing now through Gen AI is nothing that we've seen before. And so it's really interesting to me that, again, a lot of contact support models really has to change. I think we'll see a phase in a number of years where contact centres have to reinvent

themselves. What we've done in the past, I don't think will be the future. And so with Gen AI now, we start thinking about, well, how do we need to deliver an experience to our customers? Is that a digital experience? Or how do we actually use phones and AI in a complementary way? So it's really interesting for me how that's going to change in the future. And I'm adamant it will change.

And there's so much more we can do. Customers are asking us to use the power of technology more than we've ever seen. I'm sure they want to absolutely make sure the information is private, confidential, is looked after. But they want you to use the power of technology to deliver a better experience to them, use the knowledge that we have around the customer in a more meaningful way. And so it's really interesting to me how much that's changed. And I think GAI is fundamentally going to change our support in the next five, 10 years. And so a company like Xero is going, well, OK, we're going to have to change. How do we think about things differently?

We have some opportunities where, again, we've gone live with our first offering of that. And we're really looking to see, well, what else can we do with technology in the future? What does Xero look like in 2025, 2027? What does Xero look like in 2030? And then, so what do we need to build now that allows us to scale in the future? Definitely. I mean, the way it's like the technology is changing faster than we can understand, then the customer needs and expectations are changing quickly after that. And businesses need to be like staying on pace with that how how do you think that the customer needs are going to change in in the near as well as distant future if you have any projections that you could make

look you know my view is that um we'll move much more from a reactive to a proactive i've touched on that uh earlier we will certainly start going out to customers in a much more meaningful way uh with more personalisation of information. Probably, you know, again, contact centres have been accused in the past of maybe having a more of a scattergun approach. And I think we'll see much more personalisation come into that. I think we'll start using more and more technology in our solutions that, again, creates that efficiency, allows allows to scale much more. And where models like that I've seen is very human focused, but very conscious that the humans are a large part of the expense of running an organisation, I think we'll see organisations really try and limit the human growth

and look at technology as the first enabler of bringing personalisation into customers. So I think it will be a change, not just in our industry, but I think we'll see it across our business much more. And I know there are fads, and I know that people want to talk about digital photos, but this feels like this huge opportunity that companies need to embrace. My hope is really that we get to focus more on that human element and having our team spend time with customers instead of, you know, so we can reduce time spent in technology

and more time actually with our customers. I don't know if you agree or disagree. That has to be the future. Our people want personalisation. They want to know that the answer they get, they want to know that the way that they're treated is different from other people. And so Gen AI allows that to happen.

Again, we're in the infancy of the start of Gen AI solutions coming into organisations, and I'm fascinated to see what other companies are doing and how they're thinking about it. So again, the challenge of being in New Zealand and a million miles from everywhere is really reaching out to understand what other companies are doing

because I think together we'll be better in terms of thinking about the experience our customers go through and how do we need to adapt. I always love the saying, collaboration is the new competition. And I think it's so needed in this world of AI because customers are changing, our mindsets are changing so rapidly. And we will all benefit if we approach this together and, you know, learn from one another. That's awesome.

Well said. And it's a great opportunity that we've got going forward to be unified in terms of a lot of the things that we do. And it's pretty exciting. It is. 100%. All right. I have one last question for you. I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit. And the question is, what is one piece of advice that you would give to a customer experience leader? If there was one thing that you're like, you got to know this. I think a lot of people can solve today's problems. So if I look at Xero today, for example, you know, I know how many customers we have. I know therefore what's the experience I want to give them. I know how to set up and operate for that. I think the challenge has always been is what does your company look like in three years, five years, seven years' time?

And I know that it's hard for many companies to do that. But if you can think about where you are as an organization, where you'll be in the future, then you can start thinking about what's the experience I want to give then? How do I need to grow? How do I need to grow? How do I need to adapt how we do things? You can't wait to the 11th hour before you decide to change or change processes or technology. And so I spend a lot of my time dreaming about the future. And so again, I've touched on it.

So what does zero look like in 2025? What does it look like in 2027, 2030? And so I spend most of my time dreaming about what zero looks like in 2025? What does it look like in 2027, 2030? And so I spend most of my time dreaming about what Xero looks like in the future, hopefully trying to get that right most of the time. So I'd encourage anybody to think about, well, what does the company look like in the future? How do you think you'll service customers? How do you think you'll try and win customers, look after customers? And therefore you can adapt your processes, your technology, your service offering based on what you look like in the future rather than what you look like today.

I think that is such important advice and it can be so difficult, especially for those of us in the startup realm, to find that time. But I'm so glad you're underscoring it because it is critical. Well, startups, it was this amazing opportunity. Startups are incredibly hard because you're trying to plan for future growth while sometimes being limited with what you can actually do in terms of technology or process.

So you do have to think about the future. And so that was easy when we had 100,000 customers and I was having to dream about what Xero looked like with a million customers. But every day, even now, I'm still looking about what Xero looks like in the future. And then do we have the right tools? Do we have the right people, the right leaders? Do we have the right environment that we need to come into that space?

And so it's such an important way of doing about it. It's critical. I hope that resonates with people. It's such an important way of thinking about the future rather than today. Yeah. Do you have any techniques to carve out that time? I'm just curious. Look, I probably know everybody else does, and I have specialists in areas that probably is my development area. So I have some really talented leaders that come in and can run operations beautifully. I have a couple of strategy people that help balance some of my crazy ideas around what the future looks like. And then it probably gives me time to therefore think about the future.

And so I can still dive into the operation if something's going wrong. But most of my time is spent thinking about the future because I have the talent around me that can focus on the bits that I can't spend time on. Yeah, we are only as strong as our team, right? Yeah, you have to spend time in building that muscle. And so, again, I've got some fantastic operational people that by their own admission wouldn't say they're great at strategy. I have some great strategy people that probably by again, their own admission wouldn't think they're great operationally. I think they are. But it's how you get that balance right with your team, your leaders. And again,

who are your next leaders? So who are the people that you need to move into leadership roles now rather than the last minute and watch them develop and grow. And so when you really, truly need them, they're ready to whatever faces them going forward. That's wonderful. Well, thank you, Nigel, so much for coming on the show. I am definitely leaving inspired to think differently and I hope that our listeners are as well. So thank you so much for being here and we'll speak to you differently. And I hope that our listeners are as well. So thank you so much for being here and we'll speak to you soon. Thanks, Natalie.

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