Andrew and Callum representing SuiteFiles in style!
From a product perspective, the SuiteFiles roadshow with our partner, Abacus Business Solutions, was a real success. Customer feedback and the insights gained from excited prospects both left their mark, and already we are moving to address some of the common themes that surfaced.
Here are our top highlights from the trip.
Callum McNeill, CTO at The Full Suite
Seeing happy customers
As the product team, we’re usually busy improving SuiteFiles – constantly brainstorming ideas, creating prototypes, researching new approaches, digging through logs, coming up with new hypotheses, and responding to support calls. This often means we don’t get a chance to just chat to real customers.
During our trip to Australia, we popped in to see a number of our customers – large and small, long time users and new recruits. It was great to see that all of them were happy! Of course, there is always huge room to improve, and we have a huge new to-do list, but it was really encouraging to see the positive changes that many customers have experienced after migrating to SuiteFiles.
Realising that we need to communicate features better
Some of the common feature requests that we got included:
- Scanning physical files
- Prepopulating of a document, with data from Xero Practice Manager/WorkflowMax
- ‘Save on send’ functionality, for filing of emails from Outlook
It was with great relief that we could demo ALL of these features on the spot, but it wasn’t ideal that current users were not aware that they existed in the first place, some for over a year! We realised that we need to do a better job at communicating updates and new features to customers.
In many ways adding great new product features can feel a bit like the ‘If a tree falls in a forest…’ scenario – if no one knows the feature is there, does it even exist? Next steps for the team involve tweaking and enhancing features with a renewed effort to communicate these updates better in future.
Developing great new partnerships
This trip was a great first step towards improving our offering for Australian customers, and couldn’t have done it without the great new partnership we have with Greg and the team from Abacus Business Solutions.
We’re very excited to work more closely with them in the future – sharing a few more craft beers, and utilising their XPM expertise to make the integration between the Xero ecosystem and SuiteFiles even better.
Andrew Sims, General Manager at The Full Suite
Seeing the interest in SuiteFiles
There’s nothing more validating for a business than seeing people excited about your service and/or product. Many companies who attended our roadshow saw SuiteFiles as a potential answer to their need for an easy file management solution – a need not currently being met by the other options out there.
The team at Xero were also excited after seeing SuiteFiles and what it can do, even giving SuiteFiles a shout at on stage at their Melbourne roadshow event – thanks guys!
Getting lots of new ideas
Everyone we visited had great ideas about how we could make SuiteFiles a better product. Some ideas were simple and will be easy to implement (we’ve even started doing some of them), while others were more complicated and will be tougher to crack, but we’re up to the challenge!
The feedback we received was invaluable as always. By listening and implementing them we’re excited that these changes will make customers happier with SuiteFiles, and will encourage new users to jump on board and get SuiteFiles for their business.
An opportunity to build relationships
It was fantastic to spend some quality time with our new partner, Abacus Business Solutions, as well as meeting lots of the staff at Xero Australia, particularly the Sales team. These people are at the coal face every day, working with customers to get the best tools for them. It was great to tie-in with them to get better insight into how SuiteFiles can help to round out the Xero offering for businesses.
Thanks to our customers who invited us to visit, and to everyone who came out to one of our events! And of course thanks to Abacus Business for being a great partner and roadtrip buddy.
