Customer Success

Xero’s Former CRO on Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience at Scale

February 26, 2018

Customer acquisition is always front and center when a company is in high-growth mode. During periods of intense expansion, everyone is hyper focused on attracting and converting as many new customers as possible. Customer experience and customer education are far too often afterthoughts, thrown together without any real strategy. This is a big mistake.

I recently sat down with Amy Vetter, former Chief Relationship Officer at Xero. Amy was responsible for leading teams to develop innovative customer experiences and education efforts. During our discussion she shared some insights about the best practices she employed to help contribute to Xero earning its spot as a market leader in driving customer engagement and adoption. Here are five of her top tips for delivering exceptional customer experience at scale:

  1. Listen to Your Customer
  2. Take a Team Approach (But Know Your Role)
  3. Make NPS Your Guiding Light
  4. Make Customer Education Fun
  5. Go Beyond Onboarding

1. Listen to Your Customer

Delivering exceptional customer experience starts with truly understanding the customer journey. And to understand it, you need to listen to your customer. Amy has seen a lot of tech companies fall into the trap of thinking they understand their customers’ needs and work towards a solution while ignoring the voice of the customer.

“What doesn’t happen nearly enough is a team going in and being silent. You need to go to the customers you’re trying to attract and really watch how they work, listen to their customer interactions, and be a fly on the wall.”

Amy also advocates strongly for developing deep subject matter expertise in order to understand your customers’ perspective or contract someone who does to help inform decisions. Someone who has lived the life of the customer will have a much deeper understanding of customer pain points and in turn will be able to conduct more effective customer research. They will know not only when to dig deeper, but also exactly which follow-up questions will uncover the most important insights. This will unveil what’s working, what’s missing, and what your company can do to better support the customer to inform your customer success roadmap. As a CPA herself, Amy truly walked in her customers’ shoes and could connect with Xero’s target market – accounting professionals. While not everyone in your customer success organization will have this luxury, ongoing voice-of-the-customer research will help keep you in tune with your customers.

2. Take a Team Approach (But Know Your Role)

Managing the customer relationship is tricky because – done right – it involves everyone in your company, which means there are a lot of moving parts. The most effective customer experience spans the entire customer journey, seamlessly connecting the dots from marketing and sales to onboarding, customer success, and beyond. Without a holistic “big picture” view, you can wind up with a lot of uncoordinated customer touchpoints.

The solution may sound like a dichotomy: you need a team approach, but you also need to identify one leader:

“No one owns a customer relationship. It should be a team approach, but I absolutely think that the account manager or sales rep who is assigned to a customer needs to be the team quarterback.”

In other words, success depends on having everyone involved, but also having really clearly defined roles and responsibilities that eliminate the risk of confusing crossover or duplication of efforts. You’ve got one person calling the shots, and everyone else knowing what they need to do to complete the play.

In most cases, the account manager will be the quarterback because that’s the role with the closest customer relationship. They are often responsible for facilitating the customer journey, having conversations about the customer’s ongoing business needs, identifying how the company can best support and educate the customer and bringing everything back to the larger team so they can execute against what they’ve learned.

3. Make NPS Your Guiding Light

When it comes to measuring the success of your efforts in customer experience and education, Amy looks to Net Promoter Score (NPS) as the absolute number one indicator of business health. While at its core, NPS is a straightforward question – Would you recommend this [company] to a friend or colleague? – it does the very important job of measuring customer loyalty and willingness to refer other customers. As Amy puts it,

“It’s a very simple question, but it means so much, especially if you’re trying to increase your word of mouth reach. You need people to do more than say something was good; you need them to want to tell everybody how awesome it was and be excited about having an experience with it.”

Word of mouth is critical for startup companies, especially those that sell into SMB markets with strong peer communities. NPS is a truly end-to-end metric that gives you an accurate sense of how your customers really feel about your product. NPS should be leveraged across your entire organization. What it reveals is relevant not just to the customer success team, but to all customer-facing teams.

4. Make Customer Education Fun

One thing that can contribute to stronger NPS is taking a truly innovative and customer-centric approach to how you educate your customers on your product. One of her first roles at Xero was global education. She and her team set as one of their first goals to overhaul the brand’s global education experience to make it so different that the company’s accountant customers would be inspired to tell their colleagues and peers about it. “I really stepped back and rethought our approach to education,” Amy says.

“Knowing how busy accountants are, one of the things we did – which was a first in the accounting industry market – was eliminate a test for certification. We didn’t want a situation where customers were dreading a test and feeling bad if they failed it. Instead we reorganized our content modules around roles so people could pick their learning path. We made the content fun by creating interactive activities that was relevant to their day to day jobs that they had to complete successfully along the way.”

5. Go Beyond Onboarding

Amy also highlighted that you need to think about your customer experience beyond just onboarding. While customer experience and education are instrumental in getting new customers up and running, they also have the potential to support customers far beyond their initial introduction to your product. Amy found great success in providing educational content that went beyond just the company’s software.

“When you think about what we do as technology companies, we’re trying to help our customers change their businesses for the better,” Amy says.

“At Xero, we help customers think through all the business decisions they need to make. We know that if they are using Xero, but delivering their accounting services the same way they always have, they haven’t built any efficiencies and they aren’t taking advantage of the platform’s power. So, we spend time with them as a consultant, providing support from a business perspective, and that has made a huge impact on speeding up their growth because they have nowhere else to look for that support.”

Amy summed up her philosophy on customer experience and education perfectly when talking about Xero’s mantra: recruit, educate, grow.

“That mantra makes so much sense to me because it’s not just about acquiring the customer and then leaving them to fail. Education is a key piece of the customer journey. When you deliver it well, it completely changes the customer experience, and people have a different feeling about your product and your company because you’re supporting them so well. This leads not just to growth within accounts, but growth across new accounts.”


Amy Vetter is an accomplished business executive, board member, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, author and CPA.CITP, CGMA. As a board member, she helps companies scale, innovate and embrace the human opportunity of digital transformation. She has been recognized as Top 100 Most Influential Person by Accounting Today and named Most Powerful Women in Accounting by CPA Practice Advisor multiple times.

For more from Amy, listen to the full recording of our conversation. And for more inspiring and informative interviews and panels, check out our upcoming webinars and in-person events.

Ashley Minogue

Senior Director of Growth

Ashley is Senior Director of Growth on OpenView's Expansion team. She helps OpenView’s portfolio companies achieve repeatable scale via marketing, sales and pricing strategy optimization. Most frequently, she partners with the portfolio on projects related to improving lead funnel conversion, customer segmentation, sales process, pricing and demand gen. Prior to joining OpenView, Ashley was the Senior Manager of B2B Strategy & Analytics at Wayfair.com. Her efforts spanned marketing, BDR optimization & funnel analytics to help the B2B business grow by 9x in just a few years. Before Wayfair.com, Ashley worked as a consultant for Simon-Kucher & Partners, the global marketing and strategy consulting firm known as the world leader in pricing.