Avalara's new president, Ross Tennenbaum, wants to center the indirect tax solutions provider squarely on its customers.
In his new expanded role , which was announced Tuesday, Tennenbaum will be responsible for driving company-wide improvements and ensuring the success of Avalara customers around the globe. As president, he will oversee the majority of the company's business operations, including Avalara AvaTax for sales and use tax calculations, Avalara Returns, Avalara Exemption Certificate Management and Avalara Tax Research. Tennenbaum will also lead the teams responsible for Avalara's customer and compliance operations, finance functions, India operations and legal functions. He replaces the previous president, Amit Mathradas, who departed more than a year ago.
While Tennenbaum had previously been CFO at Avalara, his involvement with the company goes back further than that, having become familiar with Avalara when, as an investment banker, he worked to launch its IPO in 2018. After that he joined Avalara as executive vice president of strategic initiatives, where he oversaw building integrations between the businesses it had acquired, and eventually replaced the CFO when he retired.
His experience, he said in an interview with Accounting Today, means he knows the company inside and out, adding that he likes getting into the weeds to understand even the small details.
Tennenbaum said his immediate priority is in examining the company's core products, "the heritage of the company," from top to bottom in order to see where any steps along the customer process from marketing and sales to onboarding and support can be made more efficient and user-friendly. "I think we can drive more growth in the business," he said. "I think we can do better by our partners and our customers and run a more profitable machine, so that is step one."
In the longer term, he expressed a desire to center the customer experience around a more streamlined, simpler application that gets as close to self-service as possible.
"We're giving customers a better experience, the ability to self-serve," he said. "We want to make sure that customers have one front door to come into. We're providing the best experience based on the problem. We understand the time and effort it takes to solve different kinds of problems and we have the right agents aligned to it, or AI, where we can. We're owning those cases all the way to the end with the right solutions, so overall a better experience, more proactive support, leveraging more AI and a smarter experience."
Part of this vision is the new AI-driven support portal, set to launch later this year. It provides a centralized space where people can get assistance with their solutions. The chatbot can field questions on the fly like how people can change their passwords. While it will initially handle simple inquiries, there are already plans to bolster the AI's capacities to handle more complex questions and give more intelligent answers,
Beyond this, Tennenbaum's wider ambitions are for Avalara to expand further into compliance solutions. He noted that while customers like their sales tax solutions, they have so many more compliance obligations to worry about. The bigger the company, the more they have as they cross multiple jurisdictions. "Heaven forbid you're global and you've got obligations all over the world," he said. Taxes tend to lead into compliance anyway (think of the need to register with a jurisdiction once nexus is established), so it seems a natural fit for them to expand this way.
"We want to expand to help our customers with all their compliance obligations," said Tennenbaum. "It starts with tax, but some of these aren't even necessarily tax-related ... GDPR obligations, or HIPAA type obligations, trucks crossing state lines and having to file certain forms. ... The here and now is sales tax, [but] why can't we be growing new product lines?"
With this in mind, he pointed to the company's efforts to expand into e-invoicing, which is increasingly becoming mandated in markets like the European Union. Avalara
"We bought some things and built some things and it's going well," he said. While he demurred on the specifics, Tennenbaum said, "We have some really great partnerships in the works with some blue chip partners and some really great early customers on the e-invoicing side."
But the core tax focus has not been forgotten. Tannenbaum said Avalara has built its capacities on the use tax side of sales tax.
"Every time I buy something, someone is selling something, so for every transaction there are two sides, buyer and seller," he said. Focusing on the use tax side of things can make Avalara an even bigger part of transactions, he added. "Everyone has use tax obligations. We're saying, 'Hey, we can help with the process for both sales and use tax.' There's many situations where customers are buying things where they should be exempt or the seller is charging the wrong rate of tax, either overpaying or underpaying, and that could be millions from your pocket."
Artificial intelligence will be key to Avalara's plans going forward. Tannenbaum said the company has made great strides in terms of applying AI to document classification and optical character recognition, but feels there's much more it could do. For instance, while AI currently can facilitate many processes, it relies on a relatively static set of knowledge content — what if, in the future, AI could update this content automatically as rules and regulations change? E-invoicing compliance, for example, involves dealing with multiple jurisdictions with different mandates, timeframes and requirements based on where one does business, some of which could change in the future and require different solutions. AI could recognize these changes and adjust itself accordingly, perhaps even recommend new solutions that can help users in specific situations.
Tennenbaum's vision for AI is part of a larger ambition to center the customer and make the experience as seamless as possible.
"I think our customer experience is siloed," he said. "I want to take on the mantle of a great customer experience and make it great for our customers and partners. When you apply that to AI, it helps us be more efficient because there is less throwing people at the work ... . It is a win-win-win: Partners are happier, customers are happier, and we get much more efficiency."
