Welcome, everyone. Before we get started, a quick note on format. Today's session is in a simulive format, which means the presentation is prerecorded. But our panelists are here live in the chat to hear to answer your questions, during our q and a portion. While we won't be responding through audio during this session, if you have questions at any point, just drop them in the q and a, and we'll answer them as we go. So with that said, thank you for joining us today for our session. We're gonna go inside Xero's next generation support experience. We're gonna walk through how Xero transformed customer support using Generative AI inside Salesforce to deliver faster resolution, reduce inbound, and strengthen customer loyalty. This is a real story of transformation. It's not a concept demo. It's not a future state vision. We're gonna show you why Xero shifted to Gen AI, how Xero, Coveo, and Slalom together designed the solution, and what changed for Xero both operationally and culturally along the way. We're also gonna showcase the measurable business outcomes that followed, and they're non negligible. Our goal is really to give you practical takeaways that you can use in your own organization. And to help us do that, we have Nigel Piper, the executive GM for customer experience at Xero, and Amaz Thesaurus, the service cloud transformation leader at Slalom. Before we hear from them, first, we're gonna dig into who Coveo, Slalom, and Xero are. So let's start with Coveo. At Coveo, we help enterprises bring AI and search together to deliver relevant, trusted answers across every experience, service, commerce, workplace. Our platform unifies content wherever it lives and applies AI to return the right answer in the right context with governance and security grounded and in place. Everything is powered by our unified relevance engine, which combines search, recommendation, and Geniei grounded in verified enterprise content. This really matters because accuracy and trust are essential when deploying GenAI, especially in a service context. At Coveo, we're proud to support over seven hundred global organizations like Xero with our single AI relevance platform and with over eight hundred applied AI experts based on over fifteen years of search and AI relevance innovation. In today's example, you'll see how Xero leveraged visionary leadership and joined forces with a strategic partner in Slalom to leverage the Coveo powered trusted relevance layer and enable safe and impactful AI adoption inside Salesforce at scale. So let's turn now to Amaz Denyema to talk to us about the slalom approach and later on how they help bring Xero's vision to life. Amaz? Thanks, Alex. I'm happy to be here. Looking forward to this conversation. So, at Slalom, we approach this thinking about the humans first and foremost. So our approach starts with why, and then we go to how. And our why is always the humans that we're impacting with these solutions we're designing or implementing. So, in many cases, it's an external clients and customers, but in most cases, it's both. It's an external customer, and it's also, an internal, employee. In this case, those who drive, service and support for, for Xero. We do this by through our partnership. So we have partnerships with great organizations like Coveo and Salesforce, and then we myopically focus on what the outcomes our partners are trying to accomplish. And then we bring all of those things together because we understand the transformation is not just about technology. It's about people. It's about processes. It's about strategy. And our role is just coordinating and making all of this work together. We we we we then organize their service model, change readiness so that as we then implement this, technology, we we go about answering this one very important question, which is what does success look like for the humans, in this case, customers, and in this case, your employees. And for Xero, in this example, we're gonna be talking about, which I'm excited to dive into, it's about how could they scale service and support without sacrificing what made zero what they are, which is this authentic human based support. That's where our in this case, we brought out design, our governance, and our ability to fuse this partnership together to help them get to that outcome. So that's, our part in this journey. Looking forward to delve in deeper into it. Thank you. And before we move into the solution, we'd like to talk to you a little bit about the organization that regroups the humans that, Amas and Slalom designed the solution for, just to ground the conversation on who Xero is. They were founded in two thousand six. They've grown into a global accounting platform trusted by more than four and a half million subscribers and growing. The platform is built for small businesses and the advisers who support those small businesses. They bring accounting, payroll, payments, and reporting together in one place while also connecting to over a thousand apps that create a flexible and scalable ecosystem. With that context, I'm going to hand things over to Nigel, to maybe elaborate a little more and, most importantly, share the story of how Xero evolved its customer experience. Thanks, Alex. It's great to be here. It's it's been a a really interesting journey, and and thanks for the reflection of of the numbers. What what's the interesting, part that might give context to to the viewers is is I joined Xero thirteen years ago now. We had a hundred thousand customers at the time, but we had a vision to certainly grow exponentially. And and, obviously, we report today that four point five million customers. But, really, the challenge that I had all of that time ago is how do we how do we grow, support our customers with world class experiences, but how do we do that in a in a pretty meaningful way? The the choices around whether it was content, whether it was technology, whether it was people. How do you grow something from quite humble beginnings and a hundred thousand customers? How do we grow that to a million customers? But then how do we think about what that looks like in future years? So part of the story I'd love to share with you is how we've sort of thought quite differently around the experience, the challenge I had with growth and hypergrowth. How do I think differently around the tech and the and the play that we need to do? Because we still wanna deliver this in a pretty efficient way, but we also wanna try and bring true world class experiences to our customers as they grow. I reflect back, and, again, the the time that I joined Xero, we we pretty much had one way in. So I joked that support at Xero dot com was pretty much one of the most popular email addresses on the planet. And, really, the challenge with email is is one email means one person has to respond. And so, again, the challenge of growth would be how do we think differently around the experience that that we actually wanted to have? So from humble beginnings and and like everybody or a lot of like a lot of companies that start with an email address, that was fine. But the challenge is you grow. You have to start thinking quite differently around the service that you wanna provide your customers. How do you do and scale that in a pretty efficient way? And what are some of the world class technologies that are emerging that we believe could help us deliver a better experience for our customers? And where we've got to today, and and and this is certainly a partnership rather than anything that Xero just did is we have effectively had a platform called Xero Central. And what we can now do is we have this belief that content is really what people want. It wasn't so much about channel in those early days. People wanted to know how to set up their bank fee. They wanted to know how to send an invoice, how to do I do a bank rec, how do I do reporting. And so we believe that if we can deliver rich, personalized content to somebody in the moment, then then that's what people want. And so, really, where we've got to today, jumping ahead, is we have around one point six million customers hit zero central every single month where they will raise a question and get really fast, personalized, contextual content delivered in real time. And we have effectively ninety seven percent resolution rate. So ninety seven percent of the time, somebody who looks at our content never needs to go on to raise a case with us. So at the end of every piece of content, we've got a an escape or a or a or a follow on. I wanna raise a I still need more help. And so people can then go on to to raise a case in a typical way that you would in a support environment. But the real challenges is, again, people wanted fast content. They wanted to make that personalized in terms of the region they're in, the products they're using. How do we actually deliver that? And then you really focus on the three percent that need extra help. And that might be particularly complex, a bug or an issue, something that one of the zeros around the world needs to solve in some of their own systems. But, really, we've managed to manage that growth as we've grown to four and a half million customers in a pretty impressive way. And, again, then we start thinking quite differently around, well, what channels would we wanna provide that service for? What else can we do? And, really, the challenge now is where to from here rather than how we actually started it. But this has certainly given us opportunity. We can grow exponentially with customers, but do that in a managed way. And so I think the interesting thing here is what's the opportunity from now rather than necessarily how do we get here. And you mentioned those, different channels and that diversity. I believe the the case volumes that are handled, they come across emails, chat, social channels, in particular Messenger, I believe. Is that right? Yeah. This is really where it got fantastically interesting, and and this is where we truly did rely on on our partnership with Slalom and Coveo is we had the building blocks. We had a fantastic platform that delivered that really impressive results in terms of people finding the answer. And I'm and I'm a just make the point. We love people raising questions with us. We want more people raising questions with us. We've got more people who find how to do something. They unlock a feature or a product that they weren't aware of, somebody who gets help is a fantastic thing. And so that one point six million customers, how do I exponentially grow that? I want more people asking more questions because because we can do it in a really efficient way. But the challenge we also then had was this is great for our platform, Zero Central, but what about those customers that might wanna raise a question in in Messenger or across x and WhatsApp. So what we're trying to do is quite differently is think about it doesn't necessarily now matter about the channel. We've actually got the infrastructure and the platform in place. And so with particularly SYLEN, they help us look at Facebook Messenger. It was an it's an incredibly popular social media channel for customers coming in. And what was unique about Messenger is we also had a lot of first timers come into Messenger. So is Xero right for me? Do you do payroll? Hey. Is this gonna be can I do this on your platform? So with Messenger, we didn't just bring in our content. We bought also bought in all of our Xero dot com content into that experience as well. So the experience became even richer based on the channels that we were in. WhatsApp's a great example where we actually have a lot of customers, particularly in Asia, that really use WhatsApp much more much more globally than than a platform or or a or a website. And so what we needed to do is serve customers in Asia over WhatsApp in exactly the same way as other customers would normally come to our platform, Xero Central. So what what we've been allowed to do, Alex, is truly grow the channel choice that we've actually had. And, again, that strategy just moving to that next slide. What that strategy has allowed us to do is be a lot more meaningful, particularly around how how much our team grows and then how much we as our versus our customer growth. So this and I promise not to bore you with lots of graphs and slides, but what's really interesting about this is you see as we've grown and started bringing technology in that sort of FY sixteen, FY seventeen financial year, you've seen we've been able to really stop the growth of the number of people we would traditionally need to hire to serve the customer growth that we're experiencing. And then, really, just at the end of that, when we started hitting twenty three, twenty four, twenty five, we've been actually able to to use much more of our resources in a proactive way. So, traditionally, support organizations around the world really focus on the reactive. They wait for someone with a problem or a question to come in. How do we flip that model and start using our resources to go out and talk to customers in the moment? So customers setting up for the first time. Somebody's seeing a feature or a product for the first time. How do we help people get set up in a in a much more proper way without all of that confusion, and we can actually start using resources in a different way than just reacting to customer cases. So in essence, that efficiency that you were driving by improving self-service success was reinvested into that customer experience, and you were able to drive better satisfaction, better loyalty, as I understand it, and and and product adoption along the way. Is that right? Yeah. And I think customers are now seeing when we're actually reaching out to help them, it's a fantastic sort of flip of the traditional support model. I've come from pretty traditional contact center environments, Alex, and I think the beauty that we've tried to do with the zero model is actually really flip that, like I said, and start engaging with much more customers in the moment. How do we actually help people more as they experience things often for for the very first time? So much more purposeful, much more meaningful at the right moment for the right customer. Human centric. Thank you, Nigel. Now let's go behind the scenes, and let's look at how this came to life and how, Slalom and, Coveo helped to bring, Nigel's vision to fruition. Let's talk a little bit about the solution itself. This this really was a four way partnership. You know, Xero brought the business vision and the service model. Slalom brought the solution design and implementation expertise and advice. Coveo brought the AI relevance and and knowledge layer, and Salesforce really was the engagement backbone. So everything needed to work inside the employee and and customer workflows all in one place. Amaz, can you tell us a a little more about that omnichannel and solution integration? Yeah. I think I think, this story that Nigel in some in some ways, Nigel, you can even undersell this. This is such a huge, huge, huge, huge, accomplishment. I can't wait till we get into, the results. But you can't do this alone, and you can't do it with just one solution. So, Alex, you're spot on. This was a four way partnership. But I think the principle we were trying to do is how do you do this where you build this once and deliver everywhere? I've been around a long time, and I've watched these evolutions turns into multiple projects. You build it here for Messenger, then, somebody has an idea about another channel, and it's sort of your you're building it everywhere, and then in the back end trying to then integrate all of these things. And this creates these issues where you end up with different answers depending on what channel, whether you talk to a human, you go to the web, and Xero didn't want that. So we wanted to do this so that we can create a a process where you didn't have those inconsistencies that you get in many organizations, those rework, and more importantly, frustrating both the customers and the employees. So instead, you know, Xero, Coveo, and Slalom, together, we built a single knowledge layer inside of Salesforce powered by Coveo's AI search. That means that we can index that contact that content just once, and then the same trusted answer shows up whether you're on the web, in app, and across messaging channels. Today, it's it's Messenger. It could be WhatsApp. It could be WeChat and whatever else else, Nigel and team dream up in the future. So, you know, none of those separate content libraries or duplicating workflows. One foundation, deployed everywhere, where, both customers, clients, and employees can use them. And and, you know, I'm sure those of you listening are going then, so what? Well, the reason you wanna do this is to get to a place where you have consistent, accurate answer, one version of the truth, if you will, regardless of the customer's channel choice. And then from an internal perspective and from a maintenance and from a governance as well, you have to only manage and govern one one knowledge source. So I think that's really the key principle that, that we used in sort of deploying this. Right. So you index the content once, and that same trusted answer shows up no matter where that engagement point with the customer is occurring. You touched on it a little bit, but I'd be interested in hearing a bit more about how this approach really helped to drive down complexity for the teams that are maintaining the, you know, breadth and depth of of knowledge articles that Xero uses to feed this service experience. Yeah. Exactly. And as as Xero grows this then into billions, we didn't wanna end up in a place where not only not only didn't didn't they want to just keep scaling the support teams, but the operational teams that manage things like knowledge. I know of many organizations that are handling far far less amount of content that have four x the tie the size of teams to manage it that that that Nigel has. So that's also one of these sort of, I'm glad you brought that up, hidden benefits, which is that even operationally, it becomes, a little more easier and, more efficient to manage. Can you tell us a bit now about the three kind of guiding principles that Slalom used to make sure that the solution you were putting in place allowed for that future flexibility to scale? Yeah. Let me start one on the business side to start up with. You heard Nigel. You know, they're they're pretty unique. They're one of, one of my favorite customers, but they're pretty unique in that they're not just thinking about support for support case. Support is here to manage and to help grow the business. Right? So it's it's about playing offense with support. So as we're thinking about this, what are the operational and business values here? And here, it's, what happens when this grows from five million customers to ten million, customers. Right? What what happens to the model? And so could you build it today? Nigel is not worried about that growth. He's not worried about that growth because he knows that we built built something from a business perspective that can actually then then scale. And then you think about the omnichannel flexibility. If you think about that, it's this idea that it is impossible to predict what customers are going to latch on to next. Right? I mean, I think it sounds a little bit crazy now that maybe tomorrow we'll be doing using yet another app, yet another system of engagement. How do we make sure we build this thing so that this same underlying architecture can support whatever those new channels might be, whatever those new modes of communication might be? And then and then last but not least, you know, this future proof design, if you think about not to geek out into the architecture of this, but this is an API driven model. So it means that if we wanna do more integration points, whether those be channels, whether those be infusing other capabilities into the solution, the way we've designed it, it really opens the app potential. So, again, it's how do you build this then, a support experience so that as customer expectations change, Nigel and team can change with the customers without creating such a huge operational and and governance burden for the internal teams because none of these systems just operate themselves. You need to kind of care and feed for them. And the simpler they are, the more efficient they are to run. Amazing. Thank you. So now that we've covered how the solution, was architected, with that business first approach and to really be flexible and and future ready, and how it was deployed across channels. Let's take a look at, what that meant in practice and what business outcomes were realized. Nigel, can you walk us through the results that Xero is seeing as a function of of this project? Sure. And we're getting to the exciting bit where we get to start showing this in a in a sort of demo form. So this is this is really what our platform, zero central, looks like. Pretty impressive in the fact that it's got a a nice big white box. What we're try and do is blow this up so you can actually see it clearer. But if we just start going through as an example, how do I create a new user, you'll see the machinery machinery of this platform actually working. So what we'll do is we have a whole lot of knowledge articles, but what you've seen here is a it is a generative AI answer where we've actually taken a whole lot of content sources, and we've summarized it in a beautiful list view for customers to be able to see. But, again, the is around content and actually trying to do do it in a very meaningful way. Here here's an example of actually somebody within the Xero product. Again, I'll try and blow that up to make it easier. Similar sort of experience. You're in the product. You're trying to use it for the first time or or just to manage your day to day interactions. Very similar experience, a generative answer with linkages off to the different content sources if people wanted more clarity or more deeper understanding. So pretty simple, all again driven by the same sort of architecture and and framework. And then this is where we've started playing and we've started bringing some channel choice in. So the examples we've got here is obviously Messenger and WhatsApp. So, again, you can ask slightly different questions. We might prompt you with some information that we know or may not know, and we'll actually start getting the able to produce information again in the channel that a customer wants to receive that information back in. So I think this is pretty powerful. And, again, it just makes it a very intuitive, pretty natural way of conversationalizing some of the content that we've got, again, through the channel choice or where we believe that that suits a particular region. I touched on on one of these numbers, Alex, and that's around our our resolution rate. So, again, ninety seven percent of the time, people who look at our content never need to go on and raise another case. Think that's fantastic. And, again, it allows us to have choice to actually start using resources in a different meaningful way. We've had over over eighteen million engagements across the channels, which is fantastic. Again, we wanna try and drive up the number of engagements we have. The more, the merrier. We can do it in a much more meaningful way, but we want people to find the information to get the help they need and at the time and in the moment, always. And then we've delivered, over almost three million AI answers across all of our channels. But, again, you know, I wake up every day dreaming about what zero looks like, you know, next year, two years, four years time rather than today. And with growth comes opportunity, but also that challenge of how do you still wanna serve customers. How does that look like? But we wanna keep building that and providing more help for our customers and more guidance. One of the things, Alex, I get judged on in a fantastic way is around our margin. So investors and journalists and analysts always look at Xero's margin to understand how well that they're actually and how much it costs to support our customers. So you can see the growth of our gross profit margin over time. So this goes back to FY fifteen, you can see how we've actually been making some fantastic margin lifts over those multiple years. Gets harder and harder the higher you get, but it just sort of demonstrates, I suppose, how we can manage that, do it in a very deliberate way, and then again use our resources for more proactive work rather than reacting. It's, I think it it's very visionary, and it's very strategic to look at your trajectory this way and really look to capture the improvements in how the customers are served throughout their journey as to how it contributes to gross margin overall. It's incredibly difficult to do, and I think it's a testament to how those efficiencies are being reinvested, quite intelligently into that, customer, service experience. Ninety seven percent of customers who self serve never submit a case. It's not something I often see, and I work with hundreds of, global organizations to to help them improve their operations through AI. So, just to take a moment and say congratulations, Nigel, and your team, because that that is no no small feat. And keeping, the impact at a human level and keeping things human centric where the zero employees become even more strategic, by their engagements, I think, is is quite honorable. With that being said, we've come to the end of our webinar, but we wouldn't wanna leave without, leaving you with some, best practices and takeaways. So, I'd love to, hear from you guys. Let's start with you, Amaz, if there was just a few things you could leave our listeners with. Yeah. I I think there's a tendency to do technology for tech's sake. I would say treat AI as a service redesign initiative. You know, I I as if you've heard from Nigel, I mean, just looking at this, this is now flipping what we're doing today. Let's reimagine how we do service. So broader imaginations, we can obviously do the technology, but thinking about redesigning service would be one of the biggest lessons I learned from, Nigel and the folks at Xero. And Nigel? Yeah. Look. I I think it's I think I must have touched on it. For me, it was always trying to imagine what our customers wanted to how our customers wanted to get service, what that looked like today, what that looks like in the future, how do we think about actually interacting with customers in the moment much more. So really doing things a bit differently. And I think that the opportunity is that all customers have got that that we're about to see this tsunami of change in technology. What's the opportunity? How customers wanna be looked after? And then for us, it was really to to be have trusted partners. This this was very much a a shared vision that we had around what could we do, how do we think about things today, what does that look like in the future, how does that natural progression happen. And so for us, again, it was about world class experiences in the moments that matter with gross and efficiency built into that and really leveraging the power of technology and the visionary attributes of service and and think about things, as I say, in a in a very different way. Yeah. I mean, what I'm taking away, I think, you you spoke very eloquently about how making it's important to make any AI transformation project, one, about service design, right, not just about the deployment of the technology. And, Nigel, being human centric, but tying, that AI project to the outcomes that that really matter the most. Right? You talked about customer retention and loyalty and, the trust and and ease of the experience. You know, I'd add that, relevance really is the unlock. Right? If if to to make sure that, the real ROI happens, you you need to ground your Gen AI in enterprise content. And no matter how disparate or how many different data repositories that content is in, make sure you have a unified experience so you can drive that consistent, experience throughout all your multiple touch points. Now let's let's talk a little bit about what's next as a a key takeaway. As you referred to flipping the model from reactive to proactive, and I think that really was a part of this program. What do you guys see as the next frontier, for zero? Ninety seven percent self-service success, hard to beat, but knowing zero. I'm sure you're already tackling the next objective. So let's hear about that. Yeah. Look. Thanks thanks for the vote of confidence, Alex. I I I think and and, again, the vision that we've got is, again, trying to imagine what zero looks like with with perhaps five or or or six million customers. And and not so much because we just assume we're gonna get there, but the the vision comes with trying to predict the future rather than waiting to to the fact that you have to make changes. And so for us, we start thinking quite differently around Agentic capabilities. I'm sure many other people are trying to do that, but we start thinking about Agentic opportunities where we need to take an action or help a customer on their behalf. So I think what's really, really interesting is Agentic becomes very real. We we are looking at at bots not just because it's, like, it's the latest trend, but how do we think about particularly maybe nurturing a customer along, helping somebody transition in their first thirty days or sixty days on our platform? How do we actually nurture those customers along the journey with onboarding or or feature find type opportunities? So certainly generative, certainly future focused, still that that balance around efficiencies, but but much more adding value to the organization, but also adding value to our customers, letting them find the information in a much more natural way. And we'll see things emerge as part of that, but that's the exciting things that that we see. Right. And with the foundation you've set now, you know, acting within that evolution of Agentic AI will be possible because you've really laid the groundworks there. So I'm looking forward to being part of that next evolution. With that, thank you everyone for joining us today. We appreciate you spending the time with us. I certainly enjoyed speaking with Amaz and Nigel, about where we've come so far. If you have any additional questions, if you want a follow-up conversation, if you'd like to explore how this applies to your environment and situation, just reach out, and we'll make sure the right teams, connect with you. Have a great rest of your day.