Xero, the global small business platform, unveiled the next step in providing world class customer experience with the full launch of Xero Central, bolstered by My cases – a one-stop resource and support for small businesses, accountants and bookkeepers.

Following its initial iteration, Xero Central now offers Xero customers a world-class support platform. The new My cases feature launching this week allows customers to engage securely with Xero’s support team, moving away from email-based correspondence. This will ensure businesses and advisors who use Xero daily can access an experience that is more personalised, intuitive, connected and beautiful.

With 70% of customers preferring to use a company’s website, rather than phone or email1, Xero Central meets the demands of today’s customer and represents the cutting edge of customer support.

Xero Central is built on the Salesforce Community platform and powered by Coveo machine learning – providing customers faster resolutions to potential issues, with instantaneous answers to common questions and support issues. As a result, a large majority of queries are solved via customers accessing pre-existing content. By speeding up the time to resolution, Xero Central and My cases give business owners answers quicker so they can spend more time doing the things most important to running their businesses.

With Xero Central’s My cases feature, customers have greater transparency, visibility, and control over their support queries, and can access any prior Xero Central cases to refer to previous support they’ve received should they need it. They can also check the status of their case, know which Xero team member is looking after it and when they can expect an answer – all within a highly secure environment.

Xero ’s customer experience team (made up of accountants, bookkeepers and small business owners) is always available to tackle more complex questions, giving business owners more time to focus on business-critical activities.

Xero Central tracks patterns and obtains insights from previous support issues – providing relevant and real-time support which improves over time. Xero Central will be an extension of Xero’s human customer experience specialists, providing all users with the best possible experience.

Nigel Piper, Executive General Manager – Customer Success, Xero said: “We see Xero Central as the beginning. We want to use this platform to truly help customers have a personalised learning experience, allowing users to go on a beautiful seamless journey with Xero, and fully understand the benefits of our platform. Xero Central is proving highly successful at providing customers with a holistic destination to find the answers they need around the tools critical to their business, tied together with an exceptional customer experience. My cases further streamlines the process for both users and Xero’s customer support. We can provide high value answers at speed with the use of machine learning. Fundamentally – Xero’s mission is to give more time back to our customers.”

“As we grow beyond 1.6 million customers in more than 180 countries around the world, we are always looking at how we can take our customer service to the next level, particularly as we grow at speed. My cases is an important piece of the puzzle that will allow us to scale our approach in order to provide the best possible experience for all our users. Xero is redefining what exceptional customer support looks like and this is another step toward our vision of bringing all things around the customer experience together on one platform,” he said.

Xero’s world class customer support has never included traditional inbound telephone support. With call centre helplines having a reputation for long waiting times, poor service, and offering a frustrating experience to the caller, Xero has focused on building Xero Central to provide fast answers and ensure that when customers talk to experts at Xero, that person knows how to solve the problem as quickly as possible.

Xero is regularly awarded for its world-class customer service, and Xero Central has been warmly received by the Xero community with partners and small business customers on the initial rollout.

“Our small business clients deserve the best, no matter what they are dealing with. In the same way they work with us to have a great experience during their accounting and advisory process, they seek out the same approach when dealing with support systems for their technology,” said Andrew Van De Beek, Director, Illumin8.

“Being able to transform customer service from being a generic long-winded approach to one that is intuitive, valuable and efficient helps them focus on what’s important. What Xero Central is presenting to small business is continuing to show the “beautiful” approach they take to everything that they do, and we applaud them for it,” he said.