CustomerThink Founder/CEO Bob Thompson interviews Vanessa Valenzuela, leader of Intuit’s Inner Circle initiative, an online community of 20,000 TurboTax customers. The community recently celebrated its 100th customer-driven product improvement.
Interview covers the following topics:
- Enabling technology
- Simple vs. complex ideas
- Business benefits
- Innovation strategy
- Community management tips
You can read the transcript below or listen to the audio here:
Interview recorded March 21, 2012.
Transcript
Bob Thompson:
Hi, this is Bob Thompson of CustomerThink, and for this episode of Inside Scoop, my guest is Vanessa Valenzuela, an Intuit Communications manager responsible for the TurboTax Inner Circle. That’s an online community of 20,000 TurboTax customers. Vanessa joined Intuit in 2002 and has been involved with customer care throughout her career. Today, we’re going to be talking about how this Inner Circle community helps generate ideas to improve the TurboTax product.
Vanessa, thanks very much for joining me on Inside Scoop. It’s great to have you on our program.
Vanessa Valenzuela:
It’s great to be here, Bob, thank you very much.
Bob Thompson:
All right, let’s start with your responsibilities. This Inner Circle manager, can you talk about what that means to manage the Inner Circle, and maybe share a few details about what exactly is the community about?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Sure, I drive the overall strategy for the Inner Circle program, and this includes the vision for the future, the community engagement and partnership between both internal and external customers. The partnership piece really takes up most of my time during an after tax season. We partner with customers and ensure that product development, marketing and customer care hear and implement customer ideas and feedback. And on the other side of the coin, Turbo Tax teams reach out to the Inner Circle members for pulse checks on ideas for new features and products just to make sure that we’re on the right track.
Bob Thompson:
So you’ve got 20,000 customers in Inner Circle, is that right?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Yes. As a matter of fact, over the course of the years, over 50,000 have signed up, but active customers that have come in and dialoguing back and forth is about 20,000.
Bob Thompson:
OK. Now I just went online, and I thought this might be a private community, but I noticed that you make it very easy to sign up. You can find it just through a Google search and there’s a simple sign up process. So, this is a community that anybody can join if they want to be part of this?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
That’s correct. And it’s mostly geared towards TurboTax customers, but if you’re interested in what TurboTax is all about, it’s definitely open to everybody.
Bob Thompson:
OK, great. When was this community created?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
The community was created back in 2004, and it was created as a way to beta test the TurboTax program with customers. But I must say at TurboTax, speaking and interacting with customers on a daily basis, it’s always been a priority for us, a way of how we do our business. So, this Inner Circle and beta testing really quickly evolved into a channel where customers wanted to share their ideas and feedback. And TurboTax teams were ready to listen and ask questions, so we really embraced the spirit of this customer-driven innovation and it’s helped us become an even better customer-centric organization.
Bob Thompson:
Let’s get right into this. I think a core idea behind this – no pun intended – how ideas are contributed. Well, let’s just start with that. So, if somebody is in this community and they say, “You know what? I’ve been using TurboTax and here’s something I think you ought to do. Here’s an idea,” what do you with that?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
In the Inner Circle, we have a portal to help manage innovation, and it’s called the Idea Exchange. It’s a tab, real easy to find right there on the website. This allows members to add their ideas and vote and comment on other member ideas. Anybody can view the Idea Exchange, but if you do want to add or comment or vote, you do have to register as a member.
So, me as the manager, I’ll take these ideas once every one to three weeks, depending on volume, and I’ll send them directly to product managers, where they, in turn, read and consider every single idea that comes in. They use the customer voting as a mechanism for understanding customer impact and importance, and take the time to discuss it with their extended teams.
Most ideas follow a particular pattern. They come in as new. The PM will then consider it or declare that it’s not something that we’ll work on. And once the teams look into it and decide if it’s the right thing for the business, then we’ll start working on it or put it down on the list for next year’s product.
Enabling technology
Bob Thompson:
Maybe we could talk just a little bit about technology. You don’t sound like a technologist. I don’t mean any offense, but you’re more about the customer issues and the ideas and all that. Can you tell me a little bit about what sort of tools you use to power the community or the innovation process, itself?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Sure. It’s hosted by Satmetrix, and they’ve made it really easy for us to use it as a type of database like a customer knowledge management database where if you register as a member, we understand your demographics, and it’s real easy for us to say this customer’s using deluxe and is using this type of platform and they’re having this issue or product or they have this idea. So, this platform that we use really does all the technology for us, and it’s really simple to use. On the front end, it’s clicking and buttons, and on the back end, it’s all given to us in database form almost.
Bob Thompson:
OK, and how about the innovation when you’re trying to run these ideas and prioritize them and all that? There are tools for innovation management. Do you use anything like that?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Not really. Because we look at these and read through each of them, it’s a manual process in the back end because we want to dedicate the time to it. We did think about putting criteria based on it, how many points, what the idea is about, but at the end of the day, we said, “It’s very important for us to read through all of these and to really understand the customer’s idea.” So, we’ve decided that we’re going to do more of a manual back end process to ensure that we have the quality put into each of these ideas.
Simple vs. complex ideas
Bob Thompson:
OK, great. All right, let’s see if we can talk about an example here. Great concepts, but can you share an example of how a product idea that came from the community was eventually adopted into TurboTax?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Sure! We get all sorts of ideas from a simple idea to more complex. And I’ll give you an example of both. So, for the simple idea, we had this idea around the earned income tax credit. And as you know, this was our 100th innovation. A customer pretty much told us, “I want you to personalize this section for me, so that I know exactly why I did or did not qualify. And I want it to be unique to my situation.” So now, the TurboTax program will tell you why you do or do not qualify in a very specific and concise manner. It’ll say things like, “Your son, Bob, is over the age of so and so and this is why you don’t qualify.” So, it’s very specific.
On the flipside of things, a more complex idea was the idea of product flags. TurboTax has a feature that allows you to bookmark or flag a section that you want to come back to later. And this idea came from an Inner Circle member and is now standard, pretty much an industry standard. For example, say you get to the question that asks about your spouse’s Social Security Number. If you don’t know what it is, you could flag it and come back to it later, using a very simple method. As TurboTax teams, we’re actually even able to build on this feature for the MAC product, where you’re able to set yourself a calendar reminder so that you don’t forget to come back to it later.
Bob Thompson:
Those are some great suggestions that came in from your customers. I used to be a TurboTax customer, but I don’t use the product anymore because we have an accountant that does all our stuff. I remember that it was very nice the way it had help available anytime I wanted it. I could go online and get questions answered. It looked like the product was designed to really help customers through what can be a very complicated and mind-boggling process to get your taxes done.
Business benefits
I’d like to turn a little bit and talk about the business side of this. I have listened to Intuit executives speak at conferences many times. As I said before we started our interview, I’m a big fan of Intuit. I think it’s a very customer-centric company. So, this sort of thing just kind of naturally makes sense in that context. But I’m wondering if there was a time – and maybe this was before you joined this project – but was there a time when somebody said, “You know, why are we doing this Inner Circle? This is taking up staff time. We’re spending money on technology and what’s the ROI on it? Why are we doing it?” How does Intuit look at this from a business standpoint?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Definitely, yeah. And it was a little bit before my time, but the really cool thing is that my boss was one of the originating creators of the Inner Circle, so I get to learn a lot of history about it.
Bob Thompson:
And who is that?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Christine Morrison. But I could definitely tell you some of the business benefits that we have so far. And really three things rise to top of mind. So, one is customer brand and loyalty. Customers come into the Inner Circle with feedback or something that they didn’t like with the product they want to tell us about. In the course of the time, we start to partner with them, and they really begin to see the fruits of their labor when we start making changes, based on their input. We see that listening and taking action really cements their loyalty, so much that their participation in the Inner Circle creates a 15% increase in net promoters and a 26% increase in their likelihood to use TurboTax last year.
Bob Thompson:
Ah, so you use that Net Promoter Score as a way to measure your progress?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
That’s correct. Secondly, we’re never going to improve unless we talk directly to customers. So, having an open line of communication all year round is a benefit for product developers. It’s a way to quickly engage with a customer from a pool of over, like you said, 20,000 customers. And it really fosters dialogue between us and the customer, which ultimately helps us improve and grow.
And lastly, it helps us in spending resources in the right way. And I’m going to give you an example of what I’m talking about. Our product developers last year were thinking about creating a password-saving element for importing your stock information from financial institutions, so that you wouldn’t have to type in your password every year when you wanted to import stocks, investments, etc. After pulse checking this idea with the community, the product managers pretty much learned that it was not a valuable add for the customer, and really it wouldn’t save time because they change their passwords so often that it wouldn’t really matter. So, they ended up not implementing this feature and it allowed for them to spend $75,000 in a way that would better serve the customer.
Innovation strategy
Bob Thompson:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Now, I’m looking at the Idea Exchange tab in your TurboTax Inner Circle online right now. And on the right-hand column, it says Member Ideas. There’s a total currently of 1,568 ideas submitted by Inner Circle Members, with 149 in the category of We Did It. So, those are, I take it, the ones out of the 1,500 and so on that actually got implemented in the product at this point.
Vanessa Valenzuela:
That’s correct. This website was redesigned about two and a half years ago. So, it’s been 1,500 ideas since the redesign. And it’s been, I believe you said 149 . . .
Bob Thompson:
149, yes.
Vanessa Valenzuela:
. . . implemented? So, this is in the past two and a half years. I believe the year before, we had about 43 ideas implemented. Last year, was about 55 or something. We could probably do the math later. But right now, we’re at about 20 ideas implemented for this year alone, year to date.
Bob Thompson:
One of the topics I’m very interested in right now is innovation, how companies improve the products and services that they’re offering. That’s one of the reasons I was so delighted to talk with you today, Vanessa. But ideas can come also – as the example you just mentioned – from internal people. Now in this case, they didn’t decide to go ahead with it, but I wonder if you have any statistics you can share if you looked at 100 innovations to the TurboTax product, out of that 100, how many of them got a start from the customer side or came from some other source, like internal product management or I don’t know, an idea in the shower in the morning or something like that?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Yes, so that’s a good question, and I’ll try to answer it as best as possible. The 100 ideas that we were celebrating this year were directly from the Inner Circle. So, those 100 came directly from customer thought. But we have so many other ideas that don’t come directly from the Inner Circle. Like you say, they come from people that are working with the product, people that contact our support center and give us an idea over the phone. Unfortunately, we don’t track all of these new ideas that do come from customers outside of the Inner Circle. But I could tell you this: We are always listening to customers, and we’re always trying to gain new ideas from them. We have what’s called our Customer Connection Lab in San Diego, where customers can go and jump directly on the phones and help customers on customer care issues, customer support issues, like install or updating. And they’re constantly grabbing ideas there.
During our peak seasons, our peak times, we have what’s called Lifeline, and pretty much all of our consumer groups, all of TurboTax jumps on chat and helps out customers. And they use it as a way to, one, help customers complete their return, but two, to start gaining that feedback and gathering customer ideas. So, the 100 that we see now is for Inner Circle, but there are definitely way more out there that are customer-driven.
Bob Thompson:
Right, so I’m getting the picture that this is part of a broader strategy to really listen to customers, whether it’s on the phone or maybe in some forum, … whatever. This is not the only place that ideas come from, obviously.
Vanessa Valenzuela:
That’s correct.
Bob Thompson:
What about social media? I don’t know if people go onto Twitter or Facebook, maybe blogs. Let’s say I wrote a blog post and I said, “I really like TurboTax, but there’s this one thing that’s driving me crazy.” Is there somebody at Intuit who is going out there to monitor social media and see if they find either problems or ideas for improvement, as well?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Oh yes, definitely. And this is a team that I work under, we are social media managers, as well. So, we have our own Facebook page, as well, that is managed by Alisa, and she is my partner in crime. We have our Twitter page, too, which comes in two different forms, so we have our @TeamTurboTax, which helps with support issues, and then we have our regular Twitter page where we do giveaways or we hear or answer customer questions as they come in.
And then we have our blog also, our blog editor, which is Alisa. She’s out there and she writes blogs and is answering questions through the blogs, so, a big ecosystem of social media. And then I believe we partner with a few companies that help us understand word of mouth throughout the other social media channels. That type of analytics is handled by my boss, Christine Morrison. So, if you want to talk to any of these employees and their strategies, we can definitely arrange a meeting. But yes, to answer your question, we do a broad social media engagement.
Community management tips
Bob Thompson:
Great, thank you. All right, in the time we have left, last topic is really about managing the community. 20,000 (members) sounds like a pretty daunting task to me. What would you say is one of your biggest lessons learned, in terms of what’s an important thing to do to really manage the community and make sure not only you get value out of it, but your community members are happy?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Sure, sure. I could give you a whole laundry list on some things that I’ve learned, Bob, but I’m going to give you two of my big ones. One, the customer is the one that defines quality at the end of the day. So, listening to the customer is key. When I say listening, I mean really listening, asking those probing questions when you don’t understand or following up with them offline even if you have to to get more information because if we could understand what the customer really needs and wants, we could translate that into a better product.
Secondly – and this is a big key for any manager out there managing a community – follow up and honesty is really important. So, customers will stop sharing if they feel that you’ve stopped listening. So, it’s important that you inform them on what’s going on with their ideas or inquiries and to be honest about it. Customers want you to be up front with them and tell them the truth. If we’re not going to use one of their ideas, tell them. If we use one of their ideas, thank them for that, recognize them.
Bob Thompson:
Very good. All right, thank you very much. I noticed in your online posting here, on the top, it says 149 ideas were accepted and implemented, but at the bottom – as you say, you’re honest about it – you said 718, not at this time.
Vanessa Valenzuela:
That’s correct.
Bob Thompson:
We’re not planning on doing these. I assume that you’re giving feedback to individual customers about the status of their ideas depending upon where they are at and whether they’re going to move ahead or not?
Vanessa Valenzuela:
That’s correct. Some ideas will come in and we’ll have to reply to them and say, “You know what? We’re not going to do it at this time.” Or others will come in and we’ll say, “Hey, we already have a feature like this. Go check it out.” A lot of the follow up comes with just the status, itself, like “No, we’re not going to do this.” So, we try to communicate with them as much as possible. If you become a member, within the website, we have a blog where we also follow up and answer customer inquiries and questions, as well. And anybody that we did implement one of their ideas, we’ll thank them publicly. This next week on Twitter, we’re thanking a few customers for submitting their ideas. All of them last year got a free TurboTax product for this next year. We’re definitely out there. We’re trying to respond to as many people as possible, but with 20,000 customers and 1,500 ideas that come in, we want to try to reply to each one, but really we use the status as a way to communicate, as well.
Bob Thompson:
OK. Great, well Vanessa, thank you so much, and congratulations to you and all your colleagues on reaching this 100 product improvement milestone for your community.
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Thank you.
Bob Thompson:
That’s fantastic. And thanks so much for sharing your insights about this program with our community and CustomerThink.
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Any time, Bob. You let me know, if you ever want to talk with us again, I’ll be more than happy to.
Bob Thompson:
All right, thank you very much.
Vanessa Valenzuela:
Thank you.
