Marisol Ramirez May 13, 2013 BUS 550

Beginnings of Intuit  Since Founder: Scott Cook  Began with software for personal finance management- Quicken  QuickBooks  1993 IPO  Acquired ChipSoft, maker of TurboTax  Always looking to make personal tasks easier and quicker 2

Intuit’s Business Units  Small Business Group  Tax  Financial Services  Other Businesses  Revenue is cyclical due to their type of service  QuickBooks and TurboTax make up almost 50% of revenue 3

User Contribution System  Active (direct) and Passive  Main characteristic: They convert information from users into a system that is useful to others 4

5 Soure: Intuit Case Study

User Contribution Systems cont.  They can employ user feedback as well as having professionals regulate or refine the answers  Why should companies use this  Can help in product development and is always being updated  Frees companies of the responsibility of providing content to the users  Risks  User feedback may not be accurate or may be biased  Should companies be inclusionist or delitionist  Negative feedback 6

First Try: Tax Almanac  Cook expressed idea of a user generated system which would add value to Intuit  Tax Almanac- solving the tax professionals problem of getting answers to obscure questions  Forum for tax professional to discuss tax laws  By 2010 had 1.98 mill unique visitor and over 170,000 pages of discussion  Yet, Intuit did not find a way to monetize so they went back to the drawing board  Zipingo also in 2005 – for use with Quicken 7

Focus on Turbo Tax  Tax preparation product for users to file their own tax return  Preparation done in an interview-like process with questions with Decision Tree process based on the answers  Main Weakness of TurboTax:  It did not sufficiently answer users’ questions while they were preparing their taxes  Some Solutions 1. FAQ 2. Commercial Search Engine 8

C.I.A. aka Live Community  Collective Intelligence Agent  Question and Answer format between users (non-professionals)  Tested idea by implementing it in one of the TurboTax branches  Feedback within Intuit  Tax professionals working for Intuit were skeptic  Prior market research showed users of Tax software would not trust non-tax experts 9

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Challenges & Decisions  Market Research  Groups of users to experiment  Studies failed: users had already filed taxes and received returns therefore did not feel the need to use the Q & A  Decision to keep going or not  Cook believed in the concept but was uneasy about application  Brad Henske, TurboTax General Manager saw cost effectiveness of this application  Test idea with the Online Home and Business TurboTax (small portion but still in the 100,000’s of units ) 11

Launch of Live Community  January 2007 – Live Community Launched  Contributors not only users but tax professionals as well  New problem: Surplus of answers  Solution: increase in servers  Questions, Questions, and more Questions! 12

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Impact of Live Community  Intuit confirming Behavior is what is necessary to measure consumer reaction to products  Also, the need to slowly immerse a consumer into the product  “Market Research is very good at exposing problems with a product but not good at testing solutions” 14

Impact of Live Community cont.  By 2009-Live Community expanded to all TurboTax versions  The rest of the business units at Intuit were not as excited to create their own L.C.  Until 2008 version of L.C. made for QuickBooks  Launch of more services based upon user contribution like:  Small business hiring  QuickReceipts  Accountant Work Exchange 15

Intuit: Now  “We seek to be a premier innovative growth company that improves our customers’ financial lives so profoundly they can’t imagine going back to the old way.”  Not only online feedback, now personally noting the take home experience  Smith, CEO identifies events in the Market which offer opportunity for growth 1. Participation driven innovation 2. No Borders 3. Mobile Experience has won! 4. Data 16

Discussion  Intuit’s path to a successful product  How does this differ from other measures of product success?  How does this tie back to the user contribution systems? 17

Review Questions a.There were not enough users who bought the paid version b. It did not sufficiently answer users’ questions while they were preparing their taxes c. The users had difficulty navigating through the software 1. What was the main weakness of TurboTax? 18

2. Which of the following is not a risk when employing a user contributions system? Review Questions a.User feedback can be biased and not accurate b. Negative posts might influence further contribution c. Users might develop a relationship with the company 19

Review Questions 3. What was the impact of Live Community’s success? I.All versions of TurboTax implemented Live Community II.Allowed Intuit to realize the flaws of Market Research III.The other business units adopted the idea 20 a. I only b. I & II c. II only d. I,II, & III

References    ogy/la-fi-tn-intuit-pioneer-delight ,0, story?page=1&track=r ss ogy/la-fi-tn-intuit-pioneer-delight ,0, story?page=1&track=r ss  axAlmanac:About axAlmanac:About 