As a leading global cloud accounting platform for small businesses, Xero has made a name for itself by making businesses “beautiful.” Xero’s vision is to be the most insightful and trusted small business platform, and the company does this by making it easier for small businesses to manage their finances and complete important jobs, giving them more time to focus on what they love to do. 

Launched in New Zealand in 2006, Xero grew quickly, challenging established platforms and providers with fully cloud-based accounting software, an open platform, and an ecosystem focused on enabling both accountants and bookkeepers, as well as small businesses. Xero now serves 4.2 million subscribers worldwide through a Salesforce support platform that provides accurate, fast answers to questions and support requests.

Many of Xero’s products use artificial intelligence to streamline tasks, deliver insights, and help customers get the answers they need. The introduction of a new GenAI customer support assistant into their Facebook Messenger channel aims to raise the bar even higher, providing contextual, personalised answers to support queries quickly in the places they need them most.

Xero strives to make life better for small businesses and is committed to continuing to innovate across its platform and create ongoing value for customers. The business is always looking for ways to unlock long-term efficiency, scalability, and productivity. At the same time, a consistent customer experience across all channels is paramount to the Xero strategy and vision to deliver world-class experiences to its customers.  

In an effort to enhance its service channels, leverage an extensive knowledge base, and extend self-service functionality to social media, Xero partnered with Slalom to create a GenAI assistant that could engage conversationally with customers and provide answers quickly, accurately, and with links off to more content if desired. First up, the Xero Facebook Messenger support channel.

To create a unified experience, the solution was designed to integrate into the company’s sophisticated Salesforce Service Cloud platform. 

A key challenge was selecting the ideal LLM technology before moving ahead. At the forefront of customer service technology since its inception, Xero was already using several commercial off-the-shelf and custom-built LLMs to deliver generative service responses. Extensive evaluation and prototype testing revealed that Coveo GenAI LLM offered the full suite of capabilities required. 

In addition, Salesforce Digital Engagement messaging channel functionality and Einstein enhanced bot were utilized to provide customers with immediate answers to their queries.   

The flexibility of the Salesforce Einstein bot framework made it a natural choice for Xero. Native Einstein natural language processing (NLP) was deployed to manage the conversation flow in a natural manner, and the Einstein bot’s integration capability allowed for callouts to Facebook for contextual user information and to Coveo for Xero-specific answers. 

The Coveo GenAI LLM, managed by Xero, is used to provide intelligent responses, drawing upon knowledge articles and rich website content. The solution utilizes existing support processes, with Service Cloud creating customer support cases directly from bot conversations to address specific customer requests.

Together, the Xero and Slalom team were able to deliver a fully operational GenAI implementation connected to Facebook Messenger within the existing Salesforce production  environment within 10 weeks.  

A detailed analysis of historical responses and tangible results taken from the prototype build phase indicated that the new chatbot is expected to reduce issues requiring specialist support by 50%. Ultimately, it’s expected that this will free up time spent monitoring the Facebook Messenger channel to focus on the more urgent or complex queries that need support from Xero’s customer experience team, many of whom have a degree-level accounting background.

“We worked very closely to understand the possibilities of generative AI, and how we could safely and ethically explore its potential,” noted Xero’s executive general manager of customer experience, Nigel Piper. “GenAI gives our customers a powerful experience, but it doesn’t replace human expertise, and it definitely doesn’t impact how we think about customer experience—it complements our goal of developing world-class experiences for our customers.”

Xero and Slalom continue to work together to fulfill this commitment. By leveraging technology, the Xero team can spend more time solving complex customer problems. Together, we’re evolving the customer support experience for Xero’s customers by delivering faster and more accurate responses, allowing small businesses to focus less on accounting tasks and more on running their business.