Our commitment to our customers and partners during COVID-19

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To our Xero community,

We wanted to take a moment to share with our customers, partners and communities how Xero is responding to the evolving Coronavirus (COVID-19) situation.

We’ve been closely monitoring this since news first broke and we’ve had a dedicated team working on this for some time. This team meets daily and our approach and decisions are based on advice and information from reliable sources such as the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and government agencies.

Our customers are at the heart of everything we do, so we are actively listening and responding to the shifting nature of this in each of the countries where we are based. We have no doubt the situation will continue to change. We wanted to share the plans we have in place to ensure we continue to provide you – our customers and partners – with a seamless experience and the support you need and expect from us.

We are here to support you

As a cloud-based business, we are fortunate to have a suite of tools that keep our business operating smoothly, no matter where our people are. In addition, cloud platforms have built-in features that offer flexibility and allow users to work from anywhere. This also means you will be able to access our customer support team through Xero Central – our one-stop shop to ask a question, get educated on thousands of Xero features and engage with our community. It is always online, and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

And if you need additional customer support, we have eight customer service sites located in five countries around the world – allowing us to maintain 24×7 global coverage.

Supporting our people and communities

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, our priority has been to ensure we’re taking care of the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees and customer community.

We have stepped up measures in some of our global offices where the local advice has reflected a need to take greater precautionary measures. This includes supporting our people in those locations to work from home, reducing in-person meetings and restricting non-business critical travel.

We’re also supporting anyone who has concerns for their health and wellbeing, ensuring these people have the ability to work from home, with access to our employee assistance programs if they need a little extra support.

Your business continuity is important

Many of our customers are already thinking about business continuity planning. If you are looking at ways that your business can be equipped, we have put together bite-sized webinars – ‘Minimize business disruption with cloud technology from Xero’ to ensure your business is equipped with all the tools needed to empower your staff to work flexibly, as well as ‘10 tools to support your accounting practice’s business continuity planning’ that can be easily actioned. At times of uncertainty it’s timely to be reminded of cash flow, so our guide to prepare a cash flow forecast and cash flow advisory guide may help.

‘Always on’ Xero and our platform strength

Like all global companies, we have a robust business continuity plan to keep our platform online, and essential teams like our customer support, technology and product teams want to maintain a seamless ‘always on’ experience. We have undertaken considerable planning and testing to ensure we can continue to deliver the same level of service excellence to our customers.
With regards to our platform – it lives in the cloud and is supported by a globally based technical team with failovers, including a system of support coverage should we go offline, with built in resourcing. We’ve also been working with many of our external technical service providers, such as our cloud infrastructure vendors, to ensure they too, can continue to deliver to us.

Xero events

At Xero we host and attend a lot of events and we have a number of events planned in many countries. We will be watching developments of COVID-19 closely and will take into account government recommendations, always carefully considering the health and wellbeing of our Xeros and the Xero community, and commit to providing regular updates on the status of these events.

We’ve made the decision to cancel our upcoming UK Roadshows, due to take place between 19 May and 18 June. This decision is to protect the health and wellbeing of our Xero community. Instead, we are looking to create an online alternative to the physical Roadshow events. We’ll update our UK partners on that in due course.

If you have any concerns, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us by commenting on this blog or reaching out to your key Xero contact or through Xero Central. We’ll continue to update you as our plans evolve. We urge you all to look after yourselves, your families, colleagues and friends in what we know, is an unsettling time.

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