Embracing the Groundswell with TurboTax Inner Circle

A short description of Inner Circle and how it works
The TurboTax Inner Circle is a web based community comprised of 17,000 customers who participate in collaborative innovation alongside Intuit product managers, marketers and development teams. Customers submit their ideas for improving TurboTax, and converse with Intuit employees via a variety of methods to bring their ideas to life. Customer insights derived from the Inner Circle are delivered directly to TurboTax development teams for consideration and implementation. Conversely, internal teams ask the community for feedback on new designs, concepts, and products. It’s not uncommon for 1,000 members to respond to questions from product teams within a matter of a few hours – a big plus for a company on a tight annual schedule!

At the end of each customer interaction, we circle back to Inner Circle members indicating what’s changed as a result of their feedback. Consequently, this community is highly engaged (60%+ participation rate per interaction) and product development teams have the ability to iterate for rapid prototyping. We "pay" these folks by implimenting the product and marketing features they ask for: in the past year, we tested 30 product concepts with this group, and 20 made it into this year’s TurboTax product.

How does the Inner Circle accomplish business goals?
The TurboTax Inner Circle accomplishes business goals by reducing support costs, driving revenue, and accelerating the development process. The Inner Circle reduces support costs by minimizing support call volume and decreasing detractor statements. For example, customers gave feedback on how we could improve our installation experience, and as a result the support staff saw a significant reduction in call volume, and installation fell off our top ten reasons for detractor statements.

The Inner Circle drives revenue by identifying issues important to customers. For instance, customers explained a new feature they wanted to see incorporated into TurboTax, which we then implemented. This feature alone attributed to a revenue lift in the millions of dollars.

The Inner Circle has accelerated our development process from months to days. When internal teams solicit the Inner Circle for feedback, 70% of responses occur within twenty four hours so teams have the ability to quickly learn from customers and iterate to achieve great customer-driven results.

View the TurboTax Inner Circle in its "live" form

1. Go to TurboTax.com/InnerCircle
2. Start a new account (you need to be a TurboTax customer to qualify)