In 2007, Intuit launched TurboTax Live Community, a site for users to get answers to their tax return questions. Accessed directly from the TurboTax’s help center or from any TurboTax data entry screen, customers can view, ask and answer basic or complex tax questions.
Goals:
Anticipating and quickly answering questions before users have them.
Drawing upon the expertise of a loyal and knowledgeable customer base.
Staying at the forefront of social media, ahead of the competition.
Challenges:
Attracting enough answers to make the content useful.
Relying on consumer-generated responses for a subject where incorrect answers can have serious financial consequences.
Strategy:
Getting employees involved with Live Community was important. TurboTax employs one year-round moderator off-season and four during high tax season. All departments are encouraged to participate and listen to what users have to say, if only to fine-tune the product.
“Our employees receive in-depth training on how we respond to customers and how to use Live Community the best ways possible. It’s very much encouraged,” Jeff Stevenson, Live Community manager at Intuit, told eMarketer in a June 2011 interview.
A good deal of interaction, however, comes from “super users”—a group of industry experts, such as accountants and law and tax professors, who go through a vetting process to test their accuracy and professionalism. Some spend up to 12 hours per day on the site.
Between employees, super users and the community, the answers stay relevant. TurboTax focuses on teaching by example and is careful to only remove offensive content, not incorrect information. “It’s encouraging more participation rather than just deleting and discouraging a person because then what they worked on isn’t visible in the community anymore,” said Stevenson.
Live Community users are motivated by points earned when their responses are given a thumbs up. Appreciation can also be expressed via a happy face button, which is more personalized than a generic up or down vote. All user profiles can be viewed to see how many thanks, votes and points a particular person has earned, which is a good way to determine success records.
Results:
Attracting participants has not been a problem. Over 90% of employees have Live Community accounts and around 100 super users have joined the site. One top super user alone has answered over 70,000 questions and has had his answers viewed over 9 million times.
Intuit learned that people with specialized knowledge often like to share their expertise. They were able to capitalize on super users’ willingness to help customers and set a professional tone on Live Community for the general public.
They also found that customer inquiries are often less complex than they first appear. Rather than having many customer service representatives waiting to help with ad hoc requests, a storehouse of commonly asked questions can be built up, drawn upon and added to by users.
Of the more than 800,000 questions that have been posed, 770,000 have been answered—about a 96% response rate. A large portion of the unanswered ones did not have enough information in the original question for a response.
Benefits of Live Community have been twofold: Keeping staff costs low and increasing response time for customer questions. “We recognize that having our support costs go down is kind of a happy byproduct of having Live Community. But we want to give our customers the answer to their questions as fast as possible, and that’s the whole reason we put Live Community in the product,” Stevenson explained. “I know, as a customer, when I have a question I want it answered fast. And this is the best way we can do it.”
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