Disclaimer: This is a combination of my personal experience with Xero which should also resonate with how my colleagues have felt.
How someone treats service workers speaks volumes about a person's character. Unfortunately, this couldn't resonate more with Xero as a company and I wish I didn't have to write this review. If you are looking to join Xero's Customer Experience (CX) team, I would highly suggest for you to reconsider.
I was a former CX Specialist on the North American team and I have worked with Xero throughout the pandemic. Let me acknowledge first that no company is perfect during unprecedented times, but Xero really exceeded my expectations on how badly they messed this up for their CX team.
The company I was working with was acquired by Xero in 2018 but the transition of power didn't take place until early 2020. Despite multiple suggestions from the team to reconsider based on timing and circumstance (pandemic), Xero chose to proceed with the transition of employees' roles and responsibilities from the original company to Xero full-time. Our Customer Experience team worked at home for less than 3 weeks before we were given two options: leave the company willingly without severance or sign a less favourable agreement with Xero. In the span of 2 weeks afterwards, everyone on our team was demoted; the responsibilities also grew as we were the sole customer-facing team at the time. This would have been relatively acceptable during a pandemic if Xero didn't make it insufferable to work with them.
A lot of our team members had personal problems at the beginning of the pandemic, none of which the leadership team had shown empathy and assistance with on top of the stress we had during the transition. One example is our employee allowance for working from home and other equipment needs. We had to take time out of our non-working hours to write an essay to our management on why we deserve to spend a "reasonable" amount of money on a desk or a monitor. Some of us were working on kitchen counters and had folding chairs at that point. I requested equipment in April 2020 and by the time I left, I still didn't get my equipment. My other colleagues struggled with this as well and often times had to settle for very cheap alternatives despite Xero claiming you can use up to the allowed amount. This was also true with vacation and sick days, we had to justify why we needed time off during a pandemic to relax or if we're not feeling well. For a company that fronts themselves as caring for their employees during difficult times such as a global pandemic, you would think they would provide a lot more empathy and understanding towards their employees.
To circle back on our roles, we were basically micromanaged to the hour and we were now operating on a clocking-in and clocking-out schedule. Suddenly the entire team was introduced with daily quotas and was forced to complete training to help with Xero's support (on top of what we were already doing full-time). Some of these quotas included the number of inquiries you "solve" daily and what your score was in comparison to the rest of your team. It was not uncommon for my team members (including myself) to get scrutinized for not "solving" enough inquiries despite working, often over time and unpaid, to help customers that may not necessarily directly translate to a "solved ticket". The quotas got progressively worse to the point where our team leads and managers were forced to message us once an hour to check up on us in case we weren't "working" to their standards.
I can understand once a day, but once an hour is absolutely unnecessary. I felt guilty taking breaks and going to the bathroom because I was afraid my manager would message me for inactivity. I was told other people had similar experiences and Xero didn't shy away from shaming their members for logging on 1 minute late but never praise the same employees for staying past their working hours in order to help customers.
This had impacted the entire Toronto team heavily and soon enough the members started to leave. I'm writing this in 2021 and I can confirm since early February, there are no more Toronto CX members left. This is happening within the span of fewer than 6 months. All of us had enough of the mental abuse, micromanaging and A+ gaslighting the CX management team was providing.
If this does not raise alarm bells to you then I really don't know what will. Looking back at my experience, this was so wrong on so many levels and I have undoubtedly been traumatized by this experience. It is disturbing thinking back to how we were treated to be insignificant and useless. I was also told the Denver CX team was not treated any better than this either (their turnover rates are also high), but the NZ/AU teams seem to have a different perspective as some of them were trained to take over our responsibilities and got promotions for them (while we were forced to be trained and frankly demoted), they generally had more opportunities and promotions overall. Maybe it is just the North American CX team experience, but either way it is unacceptable. My colleagues in other departments (non-CX) were baffled by this information, as generally other departments in Xero were considered to be a high-paying stable and great job. It is a day and night difference between CX and the rest of the departments at Xero. For example, other departments will often congratulate and celebrate each other for simply cleaning the dishwasher in the office (pre-covid) or getting out of bed at a reasonable time. To even think that would happen in CX is ridiculous; we worked in an environment where we were criticized for being 1 minute late to clock in for the day, let alone being celebrated at all. But what did we expect when the customer experience team's culture at Xero is clearly trickling from top-down?
If you're reading this as a prospective candidate, I would recommend you to not work here and stay away from CX. If you're a current employee at Xero who was oblivious to any of this then do better and hold people accountable. I highly encourage you to take a step back and stop looking at Xero with rose-coloured glasses and past their facade of a "woke and tech-savvy fintech company" to truly see what their priorities are - it's clearly not the people at the bottom and it never will be unless they get rid of their non-empathetic, culturally insensitive, entitled management and senior leadership team.
