Xero top Blue Canstar survey in Australia (source Freeimages.com/Elaine Tan
Xero top Blue Canstar survey in Australia

In Canstar Blue’s annual survey of Australian Small businesses to determine which accounting software has the highest satisfaction rating Xero came out top. The result is even more impressive considering that a year ago in 2014 then were not even included in the rating.

Canstar Blue surveys

This is the second year that Canstar Blue has carried out this survey and it would be interesting to see a larger number of companies listed but their criteria stop that. In 2014 MYOB finished top with an average across the six categories (Overall Satisfaction, Value for Money, Point of Sale, Service, Warranty, Call centre and Features) of 4.17 Intuit Quickbooks (3.67).

This year Xero had a clean sweep of 5 stars across all six categories and MYOB dropped to an average of 4.0, improving their call centre score but dropping a star rating for Value for money and overall satisfaction. Quickbooks continued to prop up the table with an average of 3.4, and not scoring in call centre at all.

Chris Ridd Managing Director at Xero Australia (source Linkedin)
Chris Ridd Managing Director at Xero Australia

The survey was based on 454 Australian small businesses and only those companies that registered 30 or more responses is included on the table. What wasn’t revealed was how many each respondent had, comparing this to previous years might have revealed the market penetration that Xero has achieved.

Since August 2015 Xero has had more than 250,000 subscribers for its software in Australia so the fact that it made the survey is not surprising. That it made no 1 on criteria that are not biased towards a cloud deployment indicates its success in the country to date. Achieving a 5 star rating which means either a 9 or 10 rating received as average in every single category is even more impressive.

Chris Ridd, Xero Australia Managing Director commenting in the press release said: “We’ve always strived to build the best possible cloud accounting software to our small business customers for great value and with awesome customer support, so it’s fantastic to be recognised for our efforts by Canstar.

“We’ve delivered more than 1000 customer-facing updates to Xero in the past 18 months alone and we don’t intend to slow down anytime soon. Small businesses clearly love Xero and we can’t wait to show them what we have in store for the future.”

(Next :Are their some lessons for MYOB and Intuit?)

2 COMMENTS

  1. Crap. And honestly “are their lessons”? You cant even spell the Kings’ English and you think that you ought to be taken seriously. This kind of ill considered poorly thought out survey really gives me the squirts. And you never even mentioned Reckon. Truly poor form.

  2. Kevin, thanks for catching that editing mistake.

    As to the survey, perhaps you should take that up with Canstar Blue and Colmar Brutan. We simply reported on the Canstar Blue press release and had nothing to do with the commissioning of the survey. According to the Canstar Blue website the requirements for any company to be listed in the survey result is a minimum of 30 responses. I’ve pasted the details of this below.

    Ian

    Canstar Blue commissioned Colmar Brunton to survey 801 small business owners and decision makers (i.e. the main decision maker for a small business) across a range of categories to measure and track customer satisfaction with products and services related to their business. The outcomes reported are the results from customers within the survey group who own and have used accounting software – in this case, 454 people.

    Brands must have received at least 30 responses to be included. Results are comparative and it should be noted that brands receiving three stars have still achieved a satisfaction measure of at least six out of 10.

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