Xero accelerates a digital-first approach to service with Agentforce

Xero is a global small business platform that helps customers supercharge their business by bringing together the most important small business tools, including accounting, payroll and payments — on one platform. Xero’s powerful platform helps customers automate routine tasks, get timely insights, and connect them with their data, their apps, and their accountant or bookkeeper so they can focus on what really matters. Trusted by millions of small businesses and accountants and bookkeepers globally, Xero makes life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world.

Exponential growth and desire to deliver faster support across multiple channels drive AI innovation.

As Xero has grown from a startup to a global small-business platform serving 4.9 million small businesses and their advisors around the world, it has continually evolved its customer service approach to meet customers’ changing needs. The company has taken a digital-first approach, scaling customer service efficiently, while delivering world-class support experiences. 

Xero Central has been the company’s go-to source for customers seeking answers to their questions since 2019. Xero Central brings together all support content in a single place, including knowledge-base articles and troubleshooting tips. So customers—including small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers—can easily find the answers and help they need 24/7. 

Helping small businesses get accurate information quickly is one of the ways Xero is putting AI to work for its customers. The previous solution, built on Experience Cloud, Salesforce Knowledge, and a Coveo-powered generative AI model, resolved an impressive ~97% of help sessions with personalised content. Already an innovator in digital service, Xero saw the potential of agentic AI to give customers even more choice in how they get support, and to make those experiences even more intuitive and immediate.

Simultaneously, Xero wanted to deepen its relationships with accountants and bookkeepers, proactively supporting them as they get started and grow their practices. Securing and onboarding these partners has traditionally been a high-touch, relationship-led process. Xero saw an opportunity for AI to extend its sales team’s reach, nurturing leads earlier in the journey, while enabling them to focus their expertise on the conversations that required a human touch.

To achieve these goals, Xero needed a trusted foundation of data, including a unified view of customers and their behaviours. 

Agentforce helps Xero nurture leads to grow partner relationships.

Xero’s potential market is every small business, accountant, and bookkeeper worldwide, so it uses AI-powered agents to scale outreach – giving its people more space for the high-touch, advisory work where they add the most value.

To efficiently nurture relationships with accountants and bookkeepers, Xero has introduced an agent that acts as a sales development rep (SDR). Powered by Agentforce, the agent nurtures leads through personalised, AI-generated emails that invite potential partners to book a call with the sales team.

Unlike standard marketing automation, the agent uses firmographic data collected during sign-up and stored in Data 360 to match marketing messages to partner needs. The agent can also respond to questions and book meetings with human SDRs, when a lead wants to speak to someone directly.

The agent handles the routine groundwork across the sales process – lead classification, assignment, prioritisation, outreach, and follow-up – so the team can spend more time on the conversations that matter. With the SDR agent operating 24/7, Xero can also respond to prospective partners the moment they engage.

Throughout this engagement, the agent helps keep sales data structured and up to date – updating fields in the CRM, recording outcomes, and closing the loop on whether someone has booked a meeting, no showed or opted out.

In the first six weeks of experimenting with this agent, emails sent to partners saw a three times increase in open rates.

Further elevating sales productivity, Xero has launched an employee agent to work alongside its account executives. Accessed via Slack, the agent helps account executives to efficiently manage their top accounts by streamlining activity management and summarising account insights.

Agentforce boosts channel optionality and immediacy for customer support.

Building on the success of Xero Central, Xero is evolving its AI-enabled support strategy to provide even more channel optionality and realtime interaction for its customers. It has recently rolled out a new conversational AI ‘Service agent’ across the in-product help menu for its 4.9 million customers. Powered by Agentforce, the service agent engages customers in natural, multi-turn conversations to resolve a broad range of support queries and, when a customer needs a person, hands off seamlessly via chat, callback or a logged case.

The service agent will continue to evolve as Xero learns how customers use it and where they find the most value, before expanding into new conversations and workflows over time.

Data 360 helps Xero unify and activate its customer data.

Xero aggregates its Customer Experience data into Snowflake, and then federates it into Data 360 with a ‘Zero Copy’ approach. This allows Xero to quickly and seamlessly bring relevant data into Salesforce without creating multiple copies. It also offers a richer, unified view of each customer for real-time analysis of behaviours and patterns.

With Data 360, Xero can activate its data to fuel real-time workflows, better decision-making, and more intelligent agents. This includes triggering actions like email or app notifications in real-time based on customer behaviour. For example, when a new customer or trial user logs in, Xero can trigger a notification to offer an onboarding call or prompt them to connect their bank account.

Xero has unified elements of its sales and service activity on Salesforce, gaining a comprehensive view of the customer and elevating the customer experience. It is now using Agentforce to improve the immediacy of support across customers’ preferred channels. A complete, extensible, and open platform, Agentforce lets Xero build and deploy AI-powered assistants for its employees, leveraging existing workflows and data to support customer interactions across every channel, giving customers increasing channel optionality and flexibility in how they engage.

Xero uses Data 360 as an activation layer that provides agents with real-time context and ensures that every customer interaction is grounded in a single source of truth.

Xero continues to focus on scaling its operations with AI while delivering a world-class experience to its customers. It has adopted a ‘test and learn’ approach, running targeted experiments to validate agent performance before wider rollouts. It also started with internal pilots—like its employee assistant in Slack—before scaling to more use cases like the SDR agent.

To support this customer experience scaling, Xero leverages the Salesforce Signature Success plan, an always-on partnership designed to maximise the value of the Salesforce platform. Alongside dedicated Customer Success Managers, Signature Success Architects provide deep technical guidance and expert review, helping Xero build customer experience workflows with certainty and velocity.

The Salesforce Signature Success plan also equips Xero with Proactive Monitoring and Technical Health Scores to prioritise development efforts and surface potential issues before they impact customers. To ensure Xero's customer experience teams can move confidently with new features and capabilities, their team also has access to free Virtual Instructor Led Training.

Xero’s fluency in agentic AI builds on the robust digital foundations it established with Xero Central. For example, by investing in a centralised knowledge base over the years, Xero has created a repository of trusted proprietary content that agents can use to provide customers with accurate, immediate answers to their questions. By building on this interconnected AI foundation, Xero is redefining what great customer experience looks like — scaling through AI, while ensuring the human touch is there where it counts most. That means customers and partners can confidently navigate every stage of their journey, from first question to lasting success, without missing a beat.