Cradle Wins Xero Award for the Human Touch

Bringing the ‘human’ back to an increasingly digital world has helped set Cradle apart for businesses that truly care about their customers.

On Thursday last week, we carved out some time and flew down to Wellington to attend the Xero NZ awards. We’ve got a lot on our plate at the moment and heading away for an awards evening seemed like a bit of a luxury, but we’re not one to shy away from a cocktail evening… needless to say we didn’t think we were likely to win. We’re not really a traditional Xero integration partner. We don’t even have a category amongst the ecosystem that we fit into!

The reason we branched out and integrated with Xero is because we believe in having one view of your customers. Xero was founded to create a single accounting view that accountants, bookkeepers and business owners could all see to help them manage and grow their businesses. We believe in communication being vital to the success of businesses, and making sure that phone calls are informed and valuable is much easier when those on the call are equipped with the right information.

We call this the source of truth problem… we hear it all the time. “Our data is a mess”. By integrating with Xero (and other tools like HubSpot and Office365), Cradle customers can answer the phone knowing who they’re going to be speaking with as well as having the right information to help that person. It’s not a silver bullet but it’s a step on the journey to having data that isn’t a mess, and giving your customers fantastic service from the moment you answer the phone.

So how did we win? Well it turns out that Xero also see this branching out beyond the traditional accounting sphere as significant for the future of business as well. It’s pretty cool for us to have been named alongside Aider, OneMetric and Savvy Reports who were also nominated.

It’s an amazing honour to have won. We’ve got such a fantastic team and it’s a tribute to them that we’ve done so well. It’s a privilege to be recognised amongst such successful New Zealand companies.

What we recognised early on was the frustration people feel when trying to contact a company and not knowing who to talk to, or worse, getting an automated response. We are giving businesses tools that make communications a delightful experience and unlock information that was previously invisible when using old fashioned phones and systems.

We bring together Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Internet based calling to enable the conversations and relationships that help Cradle customers succeed.

Brad Golchin of accounting firm Wise Advice rates Cradle as a five-star Xero integration experience. “The insight our team have in their fingertips before they pick up the call has changed the type of conversation that we have with our clients,” he says.

A lot of tech is trying to replace the humans in business; Cradle is about using technology to enable people to have effective conversations from the moment they answer the phone. Being integrated with the tools that businesses use everyday, such as Xero and HubSpot, means that calling can once again be a delightful experience for customers whilst unlocking all of the value and insights that these calls have for a business.

Let’s talk like humans.

Cradle was founded in 2016 to give businesses that value talking with their customers a tool to talk like humans. By enabling calls using the tools that the modern worker uses and unlocking insights into how teams can improve, Cradle is changing the conversations people in business have whilst unlocking insights into how these teams can improve.