What Xelix’s Helpdesk means for AP teams with busy inboxes

Joining us at The AP Arms pub this week is Xelix's Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Phil Watts. When Phil is not playing football or enjoying a smooth Guinness in The Duke of Edinburgh, you will either find him working with our tech team developing improvements across the platform or picking the brain of our customers, exploring how we can solve their latest AP headaches. 

Watch the episode ▶️

A bit about Phil

With a background working in finance and almost 10 years working in the Accounts Payable software space, Phil knows exactly how to drive real outcomes for Finance departments.

Co-developing with our customers, Phil has been instrumental to the roll out each of the modules that make up Xelix’s Accounts Payable Control Centre: 

• Transactions: Proactive monitoring of financial transactions to identify duplicates, posting errors, overpayment risks and fraud before the pay run
  
  
• Vendors: Intelligent management of your master vendor file, ensuring data is accurate, up to date, and secure
   
• Statements: An end-to-end workflow automating the painful task of reconciling supplier statements
  
  
• Reports: Easy-to-use, intelligent and interactive Accounts Payable and Business Intelligence reporting
  
  
• Helpdesk:  AI-powered vendor query management and AP ticketing solution 

The AP Helpdesk origin story 

Customers explained that hundreds or even thousands of emails would come into these inboxes each week, creating a huge backlog of unanswered queries and invoices. Phil was repeatedly told that these types of inboxes were becoming unmanageable and AP teams were losing a lot of time mailbox firefighting! 

We heard that some of our customers had tried to implement more traditional email ticketing tools but discovered that these solutions did not provide the necessary intelligence or improve workflows, and were very time consuming. 

So, Phil and his trusty tech team got to work, thinking how they could make AP inbox management a less daunting, more touchless process. 

How our AP Helpdesk works 

Utilising the developments in AI and advancements of large language models (LLM), Helpdesk understands, categorises and prioritises inbound vendor emails and creates support tickets based on a team’s preferences and ways of working. 

Phil explained that as Xelix is already connected to ERP (Enterprise Resource and Planning) and Accounts Payable systems, it can simply look up the status of an invoice without user intervention, and from there utilise generative AI to craft intelligent and helpful responses back to vendors. 

Elevating Accounts Payable efficiency 

Phil goes on to share that he believes the value of Helpdesk lies in the fact that AP teams will not have to monitor these inboxes and be so hands on anymore. Instead, they are just overseeing whilst they focus their efforts on company growth and creating efficiencies elsewhere. 

For AP Managers, Helpdesk’s email categorisation can offer further insight by allowing them to report and chart the types of emails that take their team the longest to respond to, all of which drive easy root cause analysis and allow for informed business decisions on future processes. 

Also baked into our Helpdesk module is a feedback loop, whereby vendors provide satisfaction ratings so AP teams can track and measure their service levels. 

The conversation continues to address the elephant in the room – the resistance to AI/Machine Learning based technologies.

Striving for excellence 

As a result, his team are continually tweaking the module to ensure a seamless user experience and that value is delivered from the outset. 

Saving valuable time

We asked Phil to caption this image relating to some of the benefits Helpdesk provides. He elected to highlight the new found hours AP teams will have as they no longer have to spend their time managing busy inboxes  🥁🥁🥁

Watch the full video interview for more insight into Helpdesk. A big thank you to Phil for joining us at The AP Arms and giving us the inside scoop!

Interested in popping in? Let us know – as a new establishment ‘round here, we’re always looking for more guests!