Customer Experience People Lead

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive. 

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

How you’ll make an impact

Xero’s Customer Experience Team works together to provide 24/7 support to Xero users. We are Xero brand ambassadors and aim to delight our customers and make it easy for them to see how Xero adds value to their business.

As a Customer Experience People Lead, you will be responsible for leading a group of Customer Experience Specialists and Seniors who are passionate about providing these experiences for both our customers and Xero. Your team will be providing exceptional support and guidance to small business owners, bookkeepers and accountants when they reach out to us with a question and when they reach out to them proactively by phone. You’ll be empowered and empower your teams to make decisions in the best interests of our customers and our business. 

This leadership role participates as a member of the global Customer Experience team where you will play an active role in supporting execution against the global Customer Experience (CX) strategy, objectives and key results.

To successfully deliver the leadership required, you will have a passion for resolution, being customer centric and delivering outstanding, empathetic service. You will champion high levels of customer satisfaction via all contact channels, pushing the boundaries to continuously improve customersatisfaction.

What you’ll do

• Participate as a member of the local CX leadership team to deliver on our CX Strategy, objectives, key results and strategic initiates (OKRs)
• Collaborate effectively with your global peers to to drive alignment and cohesiveness across our global operations
• Effectively coaching your teams to achieve results, including your teams quality, customer satisfaction and productivity targets
• Uplift overall capability of your team through effective ongoing development and coaching
• Lead a high performance culture in your teams, celebrating success and proactively managing underperformance in a meaningful way 
• Ensure your teams are delivering on the workforce planning requirements in our global operating plan, including Specialist availability, leave management, and productivity targets
• Play a key role in change leadership, ensuring changes are well understood and adopted 
• Provide outstanding leadership and motivation to the team balancing empowerment and autonomy while ensuring accountability
• Collaborate closely with a number of operational supporting roles to ensure the team is equipped to deliver on the operating plan together with being prepared to support business change
• Proactively engage with customers as required, advocate for our customers (being the voice of the customer to influence business change) and be the point of escalation when there is an aggrieved customer needing assistance or exec level complaint
• Actively involved in the recruitment and retention of capable individuals, building on and complementing the diversity of our team.
• Ensure our customers receive exceptional service by proactively identifying opportunities to improve the service offered to our customers and in Xero processes.
• Proactively understand and manage compliance and regulatory obligations for your areas of responsibility.

Success looks like

• Role model Xero’s values 
• All team members are inspired and able to perform their role to the highest possible standard.
• Your people are working effectively and efficiently with a continuous improvement mindset.
• Response time & resolution rate goals are maintained and/or improved to agreed targets
• Your direct reports’ success measures are met and/or exceeded.
• Customer related issues are managed or escalated accordingly resulting in effective resolution of the issues.
• Good performance is recognised and celebrated. Under performance and any people management issues are managed promptly and effectively.
• Quality experiences are delivered to our customers, monitoring through internal and external feedback and providing coaching to team members to achieve this
• Participation in the global Customer Experience team, attend and lead regular team meetings to successfully deliver performance and land change
• Adaptable to grow with the changing needs of our business and Customers
• Collaborates effectively with all teams across Xero, proactively engaging when you identify improvement opportunities

What you’ll bring with you

• Experience leading or managing a team, in a customer support environment
• Experience of working to service levels and quality targets
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Used to acting as a brand ambassador
• Proven ability to balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the business.
• Proven ability to navigate areas of conflict in an open, positive and proactive way.
• Supporting delivery of change, ideally with some experience in landing change projects
• Experience in accounting and/or small business is a bonus 
• People, performance and customer driven mindset. 
• Builds great relationships
• Coaching and leadership capabilities
• Resilience Have a growth mindset
• Good collaboration and influencing skills
• Give and receive feedback in a constructive wayConfidence - inward and outward and around decision making
• Accomplished communicator with the ability to conduct difficult conversations
• Role model for the skills required by your team of CX Specialists – empathy, commitment, curiosity, attentiveness, connection, and courage
• Demonstrates empathy and excellent communication skills
• Coaching and active listening skills

Why Xero? 

Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, health insurance, life insurance, and income protection, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.