And now I have another, very special guest, and, and, I'm I'm honored to welcome Rachel Powell. She's the chief, customer officer, globally, obviously, at Xero Software. Xero is one of the largest software companies in the world, and, and she's gonna talk about, about relevance as well and and why this is important this is important. And, given the time difference, because Rachel is in Australia, her and I had a conversation earlier, from my home office. Hi, Rachel. Thanks so much for being with us today. And, boy, it's been a year from, when we spoke, and, we're now a year into COVID. So I hope you're well, and, and, please, help help us understand what impact, that that had on on you and, and and, and Xero. It's been a roller coaster because I think what we've seen is we've seen a massive adoption of digitization across the economy, particularly at the small business end. You know, some of those small businesses hadn't yet taken that step and made that leap. So, you know, the short story is I know that there's been three quarters of our small businesses because we keep in touch with them very often. We've got over two million subscribers on our platform. Three quarters of them have been affected through through COVID, in some way, and, you know, there's about twenty percent of them that have have gone backwards, as a result of of the impact of COVID. And we've been doing everything that we can to support them, to, give them the right insights, to make the right decisions, and also give them a lot of information to things like building resilience and setting up teams to work from home, a whole lot of information that small businesses typically don't have the luxury to get access to. If you reflect, Rachel, on on on this past year and all these changes and so on, you know, and and and when you when you first when we first started working together at Coveo and and how, obviously, the pandemic was such a catalyst. You know? What were the problems you were trying to solve and and and the principles, that you went into this with? Yeah. Well, I think partners like Coveo have really helped us in terms of being able to deliver what our customers need in a very timely fashion. So when we first looked at how we were going to support our customers, I would step back and and for the audience, let everyone know that one of the unique features of Xero as an organization is that we were actually born in the cloud. So we didn't have a desktop application before we launched. Like, we were launched in digital environment, which meant that the way that we could set up our functions to support our customers from the get go was all in in a digital and a remote way. So Nigel Piper, who you know very well, he's my EGM of of customer experience. Two days after he joined, which was more than eight years ago, he was actually asked by the CFO to not set up a customer experience function for the tens of thousands of customers that we had at that time, but to really think about how he could set that up for ten million customers that we plan to have at some point in the future. Now what we've done is we say that we have customer we have phone support, but we have outbound phone support, so we don't have inbound phone support. We use the technology to make sure that our customers' requests can come through in a very coordinated fashion And using the digital technology with the, with the help of Coveo, we're able to, sort out customers' needs very quickly and in most instances, give them the information that they need, you know, on the fly at the time that they need it rather than them having to talk to anyone. Now if there is a case that needs to be raised because the content that they require to answer their their questions can't be found, within the plethora of information that we have on our Zero Central platform, then we can lodge a case and the right person will call them back. So instead of getting passed around from pillar to post to talk to multitude of different customer support reps, they actually speak to the right consultant. And what they need answers to, they need answers to very quickly. So when if if we can help them find the answers that they need themselves, then it means that they can get on with doing what they do best, which is serving their customers. So we have now more than close to two million visits to our Zero Central platform, which was, you know, the first the first work that we did with Coveo. We set up Zero Central. We now use Coveo across a multitude of other of, the areas of our business, which also helps support the app ecosystem partners. We have over eight hundred, nearly nine hundred ecosystem partners that plug into our small business platform and also over two hundred financial services vendors. So Coveo helps us with that too. In the first instance, it's really been about helping, making sure that our customers have access to the right technology, and then the machine learning and the AI helps serve them with the right content at the right time. But the scale of, of zero makes it all possible, obviously. You know, this whole notion, it's almost like you're describing data driven empathy in a way. Right? Using data, in fact, to serve customers and be very empathetic to them and, and serve them in in very individualized way. Do you think this would ever be possible without AI, this degree of personalization, you know, delivering, you know, millions of different experiences to millions of people? Not without a very, very, very large investment in in headcount. And then the buildings that go with having to house all of that headcount. And, you know, and it creates an environment where our people are, also there for chained to desks to to have to answer calls. So what it's allowed us to do is be a very efficient organization. Now one of our values is human, so we definitely don't wanna take away from that human connection with our customers. But what it means is if the AI and the machine learning can serve up that transactional information for our customers, and inevitably, a lot of their their questions are replicated. So it is it's really about the machine getting smarter and smarter and not only answering the question that that customer has at that point in time, and ninety six percent of of customers don't go on to raise a case because they get the information that they need. We wouldn't be able to do that if we didn't have the relationship and the partnership with Coveo to help us get to that point. And therefore, it means that the five hundred customer experience advisers are freed up to have that deeper human connection with our customers, and it's never been more important than in COVID because there's a lot of customers out there that are feeling very isolated and very lonely. And, you know, often it's just about, the things that we can do to provide the other level of support for them. So bringing communities together so that they can share learnings with each other, and we can do all of that on the Xero central platform as well. Like, have we run zero hours where we bring customers together with like minded businesses so they can learn from each other. But your point before, Louis, was really important. It's about the empathy is really important, and that goes back to our human values. So how do we delight our customers? How do we anticipate their next need? And how do we make sure that we're introducing them potentially to the right ecosystem partners so they can add on those bespoke apps that help run their businesses in a digital or remote working environment. The technology that Coveo, has provided just means that we have all the transactional information being looked after in a way that's very efficient so that we can anticipate what their next needs might be or how we wrap our arms around them at a time like COVID, and give them the right insights that help them make the right decisions for their business at that point in time. Can you just, for the viewers, describe briefly the the level of integration? Because what's remarkable is how you've been able to integrate personalization even within your product so that you don't even have people leaving these, the actual software to have to log on a on a portal, for instance. And then once if they do log on a portal to get answers, then, obviously, as you said, in ninety six percent of the time, they don't need to talk to someone, and they can they can solve their issues, their very particular issues by themselves. So the the remarkable level of of of integration, you've really thought through this journey. So we started with the Zero Central platform, which was setting up that that self-service platform, and it's not just a support platform, it's an education platform, it's a community forum platform, And that's the first thing that we did with Coveo. And then the next part of the journey was then working with Coveo to say, okay. So now how do we surface the information that we think customers might need by watching their behaviors in the product, in the zero product, in the compliance product, in the platform? So now what we can do is using machine learning and AI, we can anticipate what they might need to do next. So we're prompting them almost ahead of time, So it becomes a very personalized and intuitive, experience for our customers. And one of the one of the main objectives that that we have at Xero is ensuring that the customer experience is just outrageously positive. So we want our customers to know that we're with them a hundred percent of the way. So that's the second the second element that we've been working on with Coveo. And then the third is because we've moved from small business accounting software to a truly small business platform that connects with over nine hundred app partners, of bespoke apps that of bespoke apps that help our our businesses run their business no matter what industry they are in. What we're now doing is we're actually working with Coveo to ensure that the customers that are operating on our platform are made aware of what are these applications that are that are there and they're at their disposal to actually leverage, and they all automatically integrate with Xero means that they can run their businesses seamlessly from anywhere. Of course, you know, the bottom line or the underlying message here is that without the Coveo technology and the partnership that we've had with the likes of Coveo, we wouldn't have been able to scale as quickly as we have, and we wouldn't be able to ensure that the whole customer experience, end to end is an outrageously positive one. What what else? What are the plans ahead? So in terms of what's ahead, you know, like I said before, Louis, I think the goalpost keep moving. The expectations of our customers continue to evolve. We need to be, you know, two, three steps ahead of that all of the time. We need to be anticipating not only what they need now, but what they might need in the future. And then working with them and working with our technology teams to ensure that we can put the the right, the right technology in place to make it as intuitive and personalized as possible. And as we know, given that there's been an absolute migration to this digitize digitization and cloud through Coveo. I think the pandemic has just accelerated that, for a lot of businesses, then we just need to continue to be one step ahead of, you know, what might be, what might be needed in the future for our customers. So we'd like to thank you for, taking the time. Your story is amazing and, and, for sure will be, super interesting to, everyone listening here. Thank you so much, Rachel.