Intuit and Community Outreach

Posted by: Heather Green on June 22

I spoke with Intuit’s Scott Wilder recently about the communities that Intuit has put together. It’s a good example of how a company is turning its customers into partners.

About a year and a half ago, while listening to call center calls to learn about customer questions, Wilder realized that it would be too expensive to build up an editorial team to answer the breadth of inquiries.

One customer asked whether Intuit had a library of information, and Wilder realized that one way to do that was to create discussion boards where they could centralize the information they have and get customers to help each other with questions.

That quickly morphed into the Intuit Quickbooks community which a year later is now 100,000 customers strong with 50 different forums. Intuit has added layers of ways to swap information. Most of the articles that are in the community were initially created by Intuit,f for instance. Now most are being done by Intuit users. Intuit has added blogs, podcasts, and ask expert events, done by a mix of users and Intuit staff. And Intuit has added other communities for Quicken and TurboTax.

Now one of the interesting thing is that the responsibility for the community is handled by the products groups. Why? So Intuit can learn from the feedback and conversations and make improvements to their software. One example is the addition last November of the customization of forms to Quickbooks. Simple things, but things that they know matter to customers, because those customers are telling them.

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