How to Reinvent your Contact Centres to Deliver Outrageously Great Customer Experience
With Nigel Piper, Executive General Manager - Customer at Xero
Show Notes
Nigel Piper is the Executive General Manager of Customer at Xero.
He’s been responsible for architecting and building Xero’s support model during the company’s hypergrowth over the past 9 years, going from 100,000 customers to more than 2.7 million.
Today, he shares how he reinvented his contact centres to create outrageously great customer experience, and how you can do the same.
You'll Learn:
How Nigel is allergic to inbound voice, but loves outbound voice, and the advantage to customers (03:51).
How Xero’s hypergrowth has forced Nigel to think differently about customer support (04:51).
The ‘cart before the horse’ technology problem which Nigel sees companies make, and what to do about it (07:38).
Why Nigel wants to increase customer contacts (beyond organisational growth), not decrease them. Although counter-intuitive, it’s very clever (08:15).
The exact parts of Xero’s people culture which enables their CX offices to deal with exponential growth in customer contacts (10:53).
How Xero’s world-class content, education and help platform gives customers exactly what they need, when they need it. It’s created extremely high NPS, and massively cut down on the number of cases raised (12:23).
Xero’s customer service workflow that allows for hypergrowth (13:42).
The advantages of Xero’s open and transparent culture (16:59).
The values Nigel believes are key to creating great customer support experiences (18:01).
The trend Nigel sees in how customers expect to be helped, which is only getting bigger (19:01).
Connect with Nigel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nigepipes/
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak. Our Sales Leadership System enables contact centres to increase revenue generation and achieve their sales growth targets.
Today I'm joined by Nigel Piper, who's the Executive General Manager of Customer for Xero. You'll recognise that as the phenomenally successful online accounting software for small businesses.
Today, he's here to talk about how he has reinvented the contact centre function for Xero. So Nigel, welcome along. Great to have you here.
Nigel Piper (00:37)
Thanks for having me, Blair.
Blair Stevenson (00:39)
Cool. As a starting point, just tell us a bit about yourself and your experience.
Nigel Piper (00:45)
Yeah, sure. I came back after about 8 years in the UK where I was doing my OE (Overseas Experience) in late 1996, I sort of fell into a leadership role at the Ministry of Justice and their brand new contact centre that they had set up, where I learned a hell of a lot around contact centres and a little bit about leadership.
And after a couple of years of doing that, I followed my manager at the time, and landed in Inland Revenue, where I spent 15 years doing a number of different roles there. But certainly most of those were connected to the contact centre.
At the time, Inland Revenue had moved to 5 contact centres around New Zealand. So I lead the contact centre in Wellington, a 200 seat site, playing with a lot of technology, and projects such as open speech navigation, and a voice bio-metrics rollout. And then I spent time in our complaints area, and a couple of years even doing child support.
From there, I joined Xero, I got very lucky. I've been at Xero now for close to nine years, so I've seen some pretty incredible growth in that time. And I was lucky, I suppose, that I joined very early on in the Xero journey. And I was effectively brought in to shape the direction of our support model, and planning for hypergrowth, which has been a huge amount of fun for me.
Blair Stevenson (02:04)
Very cool. People listening to that would say, "Hey, it's quite a fundamental difference between the government sector and private enterprise." And that's clearly one obvious difference. But the other, perhaps not so obvious difference, is you came from organisations which were, for want of a better term, pre-internet. Whereas Xero is post-internet. It's a SAAS (Software as a Service) product. It was born in the cloud.
How did that allow you to reinvent the support you provide to your customers?
Nigel Piper (02:37)
Yeah, that's a great point, Blair. Xero, as you said, has two distinct advantages. Most people know we were born in the cloud, so we didn't really have those legacy desktop systems like our competitors had, using CDs, etc. And it allowed Xero to export across the world incredibly easily using the power and the reach of the internet.
And the second point which you raise, is that Xero was born post-internet. And if you think about traditionally pre-internet, if you're a government department or utility company, even a bank, then the only way they could really set up and run customer service departments was using voice over the telephone.
And so for Xero, we're a digital company, and that allowed us to have a digital experience. And I understood pretty quickly that traditional voice and 0800 numbers really wasn't an option for us. We were growing at an incredible rate, and there was no way we could've recruited at the speed that we would have needed to. And I always thought there was a better way.
(03:36)
But more importantly, as I said, I wanted Xero to be different. To think differently around service and to try different things. So the internet and digital gave me that opportunity to be different, to reinvent services and service offerings. And I was pretty determined to do that.
And while I have a pretty allergic reaction to inbound voice, I love outbound voice. We love talking to customers. We love solving any questions or help that they need, but our approach means we can control that experience. Which also means we can be quite different to a traditional contact area.
But it's not too late for anybody, even people listening. Just because companies were born pre-internet doesn't mean they've missed the opportunity. You see examples everyday of those traditional companies trying to get away from inbound voice.
There's huge innovation and thinking going on, and companies are certainly trying to be different to find that commercial advantage and to change customers' experiences. It's awesome to see what's happening across many organisations.
Blair Stevenson (04:36)
Yeah. And you talked about growing phenomenally quickly, I was just curious about the growth curve you've been through, and what you're predicting for the future. And what that means for how you're going to structure customer support moving forward.
Nigel Piper (04:51)
Yeah, sure. I came into Xero when we had about a 100,000 customers. Which I thought at the time was huge. And I think it was around day 2 when I was chatting with our CFO at the time. And he told me, matter of factly, that one day soon, we're going to have a million customers.
So for someone on day 2 with imposter syndrome, you could probably imagine my reaction to thinking we were quickly going to 10x. And as it turned out, it was the best conversation to have. It forced me pretty quickly to realise that we needed to be different. It wasn't just the 1 million number. It was the concept of hypergrowth.
So I had to really imagine the support experience I wanted to give, how to do that in an economic and efficient way, and to think about the world of digital experiences. And above all, I wanted to deliver the most outrageous customer experience to our customers, because that was critical to our values, our beliefs, and our aim of really helping the small business economy.
(05:50)
So I spend most of my time imagining what Xero looks like in 2024, 2027, 2030. How do I deliver those outrageous experiences? How do we scale, what tools and experiences do we want to give and, and what does Xero look like, with 4, 7, 10 million more customers?
And I learned that I can try and solve what we look like today, but the reality today is gone tomorrow. And by then we would have added another thousand customers. So again, I try and imagine and predict the future.
If we just take last year, for example, we grew by about 400,000 customers. So it's pretty easy to calculate that out. We're constantly reinventing ourselves and our experiences for customers.
Blair Stevenson (06:37)
Yeah. Before we started the interview, you were talking about some of the things you've done already, from an employee experience perspective, as much as from a customer experience perspective. So can you talk us through how you structured customer support?
Nigel Piper (06:57)
Yeah. We're a very large organisation now. When I joined, we had 50 people in our CX team. Again, you have to scale, but you've got to scale incredibly quickly. And we're a 365 day shop. We run 24/7. We have teams in the UK, the US, Australia, and obviously New Zealand. And so you think very quickly, "Well, how do you deliver experience, to anywhere around the world, with the most knowledgeable person that can actually answer that question?"
So we've actually grown our teams in those four main regions. We now have 6 CX offices around the globe, but again, it's trying to think how you use technology to deliver that. I see lots of companies implement technology, and then try and fit their process around that technology.
And we've tried to be quite deliberate in the fact that we've tried to think about the experiences that we want to give, and then we try and use technology to help with that. Not the other way round. And so that's allowed us to think quite differently around the experiences, what we want to deliver for customers and then how we use technology to enable that.
Blair Stevenson (08:15)
Cool. You've previously mentioned to me that you want to grow the number of contact centre cases you handle, whereas most people would say that they want to decrease them. And I'm just curious about your thinking behind that.
Blair Stevenson (08:33)
Absolutely. I had this really interesting moment very early in my time at Xero. I was meeting with Rod (Drury, founder of Xero) and the rest of the C-suite in our quarterly update, when they asked me, "What's your key objective for the next year?" And I thought about it for a minute and replied, "To exponentially grow the number of customer contacts we have over our normal organisational growth."
So there was a fairly long pause at that point, followed by a little bit of head scratching, sideway glances. And then after what felt like an age, our CFO, who was incredibly commercially astute said, "Surely you mean reduce the number of contacts?" And I said, "Well, no. If 99% of the time customers have an amazing experience when they talk to us, they get help, they find the answer they need, they onboard well, they discover features, then they become incredibly sticky. They're loyal and they never leave. So why wouldn't we want more people doing that?"
(09:37)
And I've always come from an environment - really, to your point - that was really reactive. So we'd answer calls when people rang, we never really had enough people. There were always queues. And it was an environment of very much 'ask, answer'. So not really to make more people comfortable, to give help and advice.
And I wanted to change that way of support areas. And so I was going to exponentially grow contact. I knew I needed to do that in an incredibly efficient way. And I asked Rod and the others in that meeting to trust me to execute that. The CFO chewed that over and said, "Okay, I'm in."
So the lesson is that contacts are good. More contacts are better. At Xero, we want more and more people asking questions and seeking help, because that has to be better than not asking. And to try and really grow exponentially, customer's actually asking for help is such a powerful way of doing it.
Blair Stevenson (10:35)
It is. And I suspect that some people are thinking to themselves, "Okay. So you've got the exponential growth in terms of people contacting you. How do you handle that your numbers blowing out?"
Nigel Piper (10:53)
I'd like to say, across the board we're set up pretty differently. So firstly, our people culture is a bit unique, driven by what is a really strong set of company values. So we all know those traditional ways in contact centres of rosters and adherence and AHT, and everything can be measured. But to be honest, I always hated that way of thinking. To me, it feels awful and I think very backwards.
And so I imagined a world where support specialists can pretty much come in when they like. That, therefore, they can pretty much leave when they like. They have breaks when they like, they have lunch when they like, they can play pool or grab a coffee when they like. They can do the staff quiz as a team when they like. Join the company All Hands (the company-wide meeting), and which is really important for us, stopping for a drink on a Friday, like everybody else does in the organisation and reflect on the week.
(11:54)
And so that's how we do things. We are set up with a high trust, and we're pretty relaxed about people doing the right thing and coming and going as they please. And remember, we run a 24/7, 365 day shop, supporting customers. And so we have to really make sure that that works. So our people work from home at least a couple of days a week. We can connect them using technology over Google, to make sure we're still engaged.
And to achieve that, we've also had to think a little bit differently. So as I said, I'm not a fan of 0800 numbers and inbound voice. So we've focused on world-class content, education and help on our platform that we call Xero Central. So if a customer needs help, then they come in and ask a question. We will serve up contextually rich, region specific, beautiful content to those customers in real time.
(12:50)
And we support that with world-class machine learning capabilities, which means that content is rich based on how we know other people have asked that question or got help, what we know about the customer, what products and features they use. So we can create that seamless, "Oh, that's exactly what I was looking for" moment for our customers.
And what we've got by using Xero Central is we found that in over 95% of the time, customers who view content which we serve up never need to go on and raise a case. So that's incredibly high, I'm quite proud about that. And to back that up, for people listening, is we have extremely high NPS (Net Promoter Score). We measure that on that Xero Central experience.
So if a customer is stuck, it's really urgent, they just need that extra bit of special help, they just raise a case within that content flow. And then one of our specialists will deal with that, will often just jump on a telephone call back to them, or will send them some help to solve it. So a very different way of thinking about supporting a customer, digitally first, and it's pretty powerful. And what that really means is we can scale and grow in a pretty measured way.
Blair Stevenson (14:15)
So you're using machine learning, using artificial intelligence to help you there. And although you're not a fan of inbound calls, it sounds like, where necessary, outbound calls to jump in and help a customers is important.
Nigel Piper (14:33)
Yeah. Outbound gives us a little bit of control. And perhaps ‘control’ is the wrong word, but outbound allows us to make really good choices. For a start, we can make sure the right person is ringing and talking to that customer. It means we can manage that culture flow of people not sitting there with a headset on his head, we don't really do that. It's not really our style.
And it means that we can actually understand when the right time to talk to a customer is, versus that typical pressure that you see with that constant queuing of an inbound situation. And we can manage expectations a little bit as well. But again, the overarching belief is still trying to make sure we give that outrageous support experience to our customers.
Blair Stevenson (15:18)
Cool. So I'd love to pick up on that, and you mentioned values and culture earlier, and I'm guessing with the growth rate you've got, you still have to bring in perhaps hundreds of new support people every year.
So I was just curious about what is it about your values and culture specifically that enables you to onboard so many support people every year, and have them sign up to delivering outrageous customer experience?
Nigel Piper (15:54)
Yeah. I think firstly, Software as a Service companies are a little bit different. You've got the challenge around efficiency and metrics. We're a publicly listed company, and so every 6 months we have to report to see how we're tracking and what we're doing. So it's a very visible business.
But certainly, as you say, Blair, we do grow. We grow quite a lot every year. But when we grow, it's probably quite a different way, because effectively we are the breeding ground for the rest of the organisation, like many other support areas around the globe are. And so we find almost all of our turnover is actually being fed into other roles across the business.
And the talent we have in our contact support area is incredible. I mean, I wish I had half the talent these people have got at such an early age. I'm pretty much in awe of them.
We bring them in. We talk about our values. We set them up to succeed. And then we pretty much let them loose. We're very fortunate in that we have a very open culture where as an organisation, we share a lot.
(17:05)
So every fortnight, we'll have a company All Hands, and we'll have some pretty open dialogue around our acquisitions that we may have made, where we're going in terms of our sales, what we're doing and thinking around our strategy. And so everybody has a chance to contribute to that. Everybody has an opinion about that. You don't die wondering in Xero about what people think.
And we use a lot of our digital channels - and Slack comes to mind immediately - where people can comment and challenge what we're actually doing as an organisation. And typically we'll hire very smart people, most of which have got some sort of accounting background in the roles that I tend to recruit.
And then again, if you feed that up into the rest of the organisation, linked with technology, it's incredibly powerful to see that talent go through the rest of the organisation.
So the values, the belief that we're here to support and make small businesses successful is very powerful, but also we want to be human and kind, and really look after people as much as we can. There's a true belief that we're here to make Xero better. And we really want that talent to come through and progress into some pretty incredible roles around the organisation.
Blair Stevenson (18:28)
Cool. Thank you. Last question, you're constantly, as you said earlier, trying to reinvent for the future. You're thinking about what's happening in 2024, 2028, and so on. As a final thought, what's one thing you think you'll be doing differently later this decade?
Nigel Piper (18:46)
I think the challenge for me is as a leader is to think, "What do we truly look like in 3, 5, 10 years time? What's the service offering we want to give, how do we be a little bit unique and a little bit different?" And so we'll look at that.
And then the really interesting thing is from a content point of view, is you'll see a lot more personalisation. And so I think that you'll find opportunities truly to go out and engage with customers waiting, rather than waiting for customers to come in. And if you think of that balance between reactive and proactive, I think you'll see Xero will be a lot more proactive.
(19:24)
We're doing that now, certainly, but we'll be a lot more proactive, and will be using a lot more personalisation. And not in a bad way. It's been really interesting, I think our customers have changed a lot, in support areas over the last few years. And certainly in the last five years what I've seen it, you'll see people and customers expect you to use information that you know about them like never before.
Sure, they want you to make sure that their information is private and protected and is looked after, but they want you to use what you know about them to make sure that that experience is unique and different and personalized. And so I think you'll see an increasing nature of personalisation in the industry. And people have a lot more expectation around that, than we see today.
Blair Stevenson (20:18)
Brilliant. Nigel, thank you very much. It's been fascinating talking with you. I really appreciate your time.
Nigel Piper (20:25)
Thanks very much for having me.
Blair Stevenson (20:27)
Well, that's it from us today. For listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Nigel on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nigepipes/), you'll also find the link to his LinkedIn profile in that description too.
Lastly, if you'd like to follow me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevensonblair/) or connect with me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/blair.stevenson.980), you'll find links to my profile there as well.
Well, that's it from us today. Have a productive week.