Xero has overhauled its partner programme to stop subscription poaching "zombies", and will introduce a new code of conduct from 2015

iStart.com writes: Xero has announced an overhaul of its partner programme, which will be trialled in Australia before being rolled out internationally. Xero Australia managing director Chris Ridd, speaking at Xerocon in Sydney last week, said that the new model would reward partners which engaged in training and quality service delivery, rather than just those which had the greatest number of customers.

In the past he said there had been complaints about partners being zombie-like in their efforts to poach clients from other Xero partners. “We don’t want to create org-hungry zombies,” said Ridd.

The new regime comes into effect next April, which he said would allow partners to accrue the points required in order to acquire one of four status levels.

Xero also plans to introduce a new code of conduct for its partners in 2015 that will guard against instances of companies holding users’ data hostage in order to settle payment disputes. This has occasionally been a problem in the past when the Xero subscriber who accesses the data may not be the person or company which owns it.

Ridd said that the new code would guard against such disputes. “Xero will not tolerate SMEs being denied access,” he said, adding that this should be baked into the terms and conditions and letters of engagement sent out by Xero partners.

Speaking at Xerocon, the company’s annual conference, in Sydney last week, Ridd said that there were now 147,000 customers of Xero in Australia. 

It’s gunning for a whole heap more, and last week announced an arrangement with Telstra to offer a six-month free trial of Xero for SMEs as part of the Telstra T-suite range of software-as-a-service due to kick off in September.

The company also announced a small business marketplace with around 350 different add-on solutions for Xero users. 

A partnership with insurance firm CGU has also been flagged which will allow Xero users to opt into a service that lets CGU to interrogate a company’s Xero data to determine workers’ compensation premiums for the business.

It wasn’t all beer and skittles for the company however as the Australian Financial Review newspaper last week ran an interview with Select Equities analyst Mark Southwell-Keely who said that the company’s shares were now priced at more than double what they were really worth, and forecast that shares would come back to earth with a bump as cloud accounting competition from the likes of Reckon, Intuit and MYOB took hold.