Innovating for the Customers of the Future

Tell us your name and a little bit about your role at Xero?

I’m the Chief Customer Officer at Xero. We have over 4,700 plus employees globally, across five continents, and over 3.1 million subscribers. I have a degree in positive psychology. My responsibility and remit span the whole of the customer journey, from building awareness through to communicating with customers and sales that are both direct and through our partner channel. I also help manage customer service, customer support, and education.


1. What does innovation mean to you?
So innovation is something that we are constantly focused on at Xero. I think that the fact that we were born in the Cloud meant that we had an innovative mindset from the get-go. Innovation is something that's embedded into our culture. So it's not something that we do as a side project; it’s part of who we are. We are constantly innovating to see how we can not only serve our partners and our customers from a small business accounting perspective but also think about the whole small business platform.

2. How does your team generate new ideas?

Innovation is not something you do as a side job. It's got to be embedded into the culture, and we have many different ways we are building innovation into the culture. We do things like hackathons. So hackathons are usually things that product teams do, but we actually do them across the whole organization. So there are idea generation forums where we put teams of people together, diverse teams of people. They can work together to solve some of our customers' biggest problems.
I also think play is a really important component of innovation. So bringing play to purposeful organizations gives people the time and the space to think differently and not be too prescriptive in terms of how to do things. It’s not always about winning or learning and it doesn't always mean you get it right, but at least if you learn something from it, it means that you can progress things forward.

3. Do you have any specific rituals for resetting your team to be creative?

I think that rituals are important in an organization, not just to generate new ideas, but also to ensure that you're celebrating success along the way. We make sure that we bring rituals to the floor all the time. We are very big on connection, fun, and play and are actually very focused on human-to-human interaction.

One example is at the start of all of our team meetings, we talk about random acts of kindness that we've conducted through throughout the week. This approach helps put people in the right mindset, and when you've got people in the right mindset, then they're more open to thinking about new and innovative ideas. You can't actually get people thinking creatively if they’re not in the right growth mindset. So taking them from a point where they are just functioning and moving them a point where they are flourishing. It all starts with a positive mindset.

I'm also big on making sure that the team collaborates. A problem shared is a problem halved. It's about ensuring that we are sharing those problems and bringing diverse thinking to the table. We might be talking about a sales problem, but we’ll bring in Communications/Marketing and Customer Support to help brainstorm about what we could do to solve the issue. I think that diversity of thinking's really important.


4. How do you identify trends? What resources does your team use to spot trends and consumer insights?
At Xero, we have to be ahead of the curve when it comes to making sure that we're producing the right products and services for what's coming. The pandemic is a really good example of an acceleration of digitization that happened almost overnight because of a need for small businesses and their advisors to be able to interact remotely and set up teams working from home.

We rely heavily on data and that’s showcased in the recently launched Small Business Insights Program. It’s all about making sure that we are looking at the data and mapping trends. So we are looking at sales data, we're looking at the time to pay data, and we're able to accurately represent the small business economy against those trends. This is really important when we think about the policy around working from home and remote working. We work very heavily with governments using our data to make sure that we can influence policy that supports the small business economy. So that's another way we identify trends and look to the future.

5. What is the biggest challenge you face when innovating?
I would say scale and also just the plethora of ideas. It's how you prioritize. So our biggest challenge is we have such an ambitious vision to be the most trusted and insightful small business platform that's powered by data to ensure that we are giving customers everything they need to operate their business effectively so they can focus on what they do best, which is serve their customer.

With that, it’s about taking us from being a small business accounting platform to a small business platform overall. So connecting with the nearly thousand ecosystem partners and all of our financial services institutions and small businesses with their advisors and with each other. So to do all of that, we need to constantly prioritize. That's our biggest challenge whilst scaling globally.

6. Looking to the future, how will Xero continue to be a leader in innovation?

We'll continue to be a leader in innovation because we're always thinking about what the customer of the future looks like. So if you start with the customer needs, you can work backwards in terms of really understanding how you're gonna meet those needs. So it's less about iterating our product and it's more about thinking about the customer and what will they be needing? What does a small business customer of the future look like? What does that generation? So we're talking about looking at generation alpha at the moment, and this is a generation that was born from 2010 onwards. They're our small business customers of the future. They're looking for personalized and intuitive offerings. So their expectations in a B2B environment are similar to what they're dealing with in the B2C environment. Their mobile phone tells them how long it's going to take them to walk home or to drive home. So from a business perspective, when they're running a small business, they're gonna be expecting that whatever technology they use is gonna tell them what they need to do next.

Ultimately, I think that technology plays a role, but nothing beats the human connection, right? And that's why things like Xerocon are really important to us. There are lots of innovation and ideas that are generated from being together in these forums. So if you walk the tradeshow and you have a look at all of our ecosystem partners, we have conversations with all of our advisors that are part of our family. They're the extension of the Xero family and they help support the millions and millions of small businesses across the globe.