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March 2004
Inside Intuit: A “Customer Wow” Case Study
By Suzanne Taylor
Intuit, Inc. has not only survived but has also thrived since the company's inception in 1983. Maker of best-selling financial software products Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax, Intuit went from near bankruptcy and universal rejection from VCs, customers, and retailers to become a 7,000-employee company with an astounding 25 million customers. How did Intuit beat the odds, and what can other companies learn from Intuit's story to "wow" their own customers?
While writing Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft and Revolutionized an Entire Industry, I gained insight into the heart of Intuit's success — the following simple, effective benchmarking practices:
Listen to Customer Needs
Great ideas come to us when we listen to customer needs, and Intuit's most important success factor has been its relentless customer-driven innovation. The idea for Quicken began when cofounder Scott Cook's wife complained about the miserable drudgery of paying the bills. A light bulb went off in Cook's head. This would be a perfect task for a computer! Paying bills is repetitive, time consuming, and monotonous, but everybody has to do it. A software program could calculate balances without mistakes and save people time and hassles. With this simple but powerful insight, a product (and a company) was born.
Focus on Ease of Use
Quicken's user interface is one example of Intuit's focus on ease of use. Cofounder Tom Proulx realized that using well-known metaphors made it much easier for users to learn new products. He studied his Wells Fargo Bank checkbook and copied much of it for Quicken's checkbook register, the primary data entry screen. The product's "Write Checks" screen also looked very much like a familiar paper check, so users felt they already knew how to make a payment.
Use Proven Best Practices
Cook had worked as a Crisco brand manager at Procter & Gamble (P&G), and he brought many of the same consumer packaged goods principles and techniques to the software industry:
- The Quicken package had a bright, attention-grabbing orange color, very similar to the Tide laundry detergent package.
- Copy on the package and in advertisements focused on benefits over features and used customer testimonials to increase credibility.
- The company offered the first rebate coupon and ran the first television ad in the consumer software industry.
Make Data-Driven Marketing Decisions
Intuit has conducted rigorous customer research to gain superior insights into customers' needs and wants. One technique the company has consistently used is the "Follow Me Home" program. With this technique, members of the product team (including marketing, engineering, documentation, quality assurance, and tech support) "follow" brand new customers home to watch them install and use the product for the first time at their actual computers. By observing new customers and acting as a fly on the wall, product team members learn in excruciating detail where they need to improve usability to make the products even easier to use. "We're not our customers!" became the clear lesson learned.
The company also created Quicken and QuickBooks customer advisory panels. The same group of core customers came to visit Intuit every month to offer feedback on their needs as well as on new products and features. Advisory panel members also ate lunch with the engineers, who eagerly solicited feedback on their particular focus areas.
Another usability research study involved watching customers prepare their tax returns, using either TurboTax or the competitive product, TaxCut. Team members found these sessions incredibly useful in revealing customers' problems.
Interact with Your Customers
Intuit also spread customer evangelism throughout its culture with various programs, such as:
- Customer contact required all employees, who didn't normally deal with customers on the job, to spend four hours a month answering customer calls in either tech support or telemarketing.
- Every fall during the Quicken launch, scores of employees headed out to visit retail stores across the country during the national sales tour, resulting in more informed and satisfied salespeople, better in-store merchandising, and valuable employee insight into the purchase experience for retail customers.
Respond Quickly, Honestly, and Earnestly to a Crisis
Intuit has a long history of responding well to customer crises. When QuickBooks accounting software launched in 1992, customers began calling tech support in large numbers to complain about missing data. Intuit quickly realized that QuickBooks had shipped with data-damaging bugs, a very serious situation for a small business that relies on accuracy and easy access to information. In response, Intuit:
- Identified the problem, figured out who it affected, and developed a fix
- Immediately notified customers about the problems and apologized for its mistakes
- Bent over backwards to make up for the lost data, including setting up a data-recovery team to work on damaged customer files and paying for people to re-enter data
- Sent out free product update disks when the bugs were finally fixed
By responding quickly, honestly, and aggressively to this and other product crises, Intuit found that it could actually increase customer satisfaction and loyalty instead of lose it forever.
Of course, many other factors have contributed to Intuit's success over the years, including its great people, core values, entrepreneurial culture, perseverance, reinvention, beating Microsoft, and strong leadership. But the most important driver of Intuit's success — and the common thread across all its critical success factors — is its consistent, sincere, and sharp focus on wowing customers.
Suzanne Taylor is a marketing strategy consultant focused on building brands and businesses by creating "wow" customer experiences. With 14 years of consumer and high-tech marketing experience, Taylor has worked and consulted for companies, including Intuit, Palm Computing, WebTV (now MSN TV), Clorox, Adobe, and several startups. Taylor co-wrote a book called Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft and Revolutionized an Entire Industry published by Harvard Business School Press in 2003. She taught an Internet marketing class at Stanford University and holds A.B. and M.B.A. degrees from Stanford. For more information, send an email to staylor@serrano.com, or go to www.suzannetaylor.com.
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