Xero Support is Changing

As of 26 January 2019, Xero will no longer be “supporting” (pun intended), the ability for their customers, yes both business and their accountants, to email in a support request. Instead Xero will now be utilising a portal that is housed within their Xero Central support platform.

Xero is now without phone or email support which is going to take some time to get used too, especially for those that have [email protected] saved as a most frequently used, in their email.

You can read more about this here, but basically you now access support via the help icon in your Xero product, or by going direct to support.xero.com from any device (see the screen shot below!). That includes from Xero business edition, Xero Expenses, Xero Payroll, Xero Projects and Xero HQ.

Now why is Xero making this move you ask?
In our opinion and from our reading of blogs and articles released,* the reason for the change can be summarised as;

1. 1. Xero now has locked you as the customer/accountant into one point of communication.
2. 2. Xero only has one point of failure now in regards to answering of support queries, personally we have been in the situation whereby we’ve emailed both support@xero and support@workflowmax and was answered by two different support technicians which was an inefficient use of their time.
3. 3. The person logging the support ticket can now see all open/pending/closed cases and their outcomes for future reference, this is quite handy if you come across the same issue twice. **
4. 4. Xero has built up Xero central to run off machine learning (please do not call this AI, at least not at this present moment in time!) which will further enhance the self service model or support, as machine learning will be leveraged to anticipate the query and find a quick solution.
5. 5. Most support queries can be answered via a help article as Xero has been around long enough now to have built up quite an array of articles on how to solve problems or guide their customers.
6. 6. Going on from point 3, by creating a self service portal that has machine learning built into it, it frees up their support team to answer the more curly questions and issues that are being faced by their customers. Eg. instead of answering “how do I change my company name in my Xero file” they will now be able to answer questions that revolve around actual problems of the product.
   
   
   

While we don’t necessarily agree with removing the ability to email support, especially for those of us who might frequently shoot off emails via their apple watch to support when they are with a client, we do see the benefits of the now centralised, machine learning (NOT AI!), self service portal, however we do ask that Xero now use this free’d up capacity to invest back into their product and their customers!

Like with any change it will take time for the masses to get their head around the new way of thinking but as a proponent of change, we at Clarity Street cannot knock Xero for trying something new, especially if it will enhance the user/customer experience.

* Please note at the time of writing we have not had a conversation with anyone at Xero regarding this change.
** At the time of writing it was unclear if Xero was going to enable firm wide access to all queries raised in the new portal but this would make a very logical step in the evolution of the self help portal.