TurboTax Live Chat at Intuit

Intuit is a software company that aims to power prosperity around the world through their products.

This case study will focus on the three spaces I mentioned above, what steps I took to complete these projects, and how my work impacted the TurboTax ecosystem. This project is under NDA so not all details will be shared.

In 2020, Intuit launched a new Live Chat feature for TurboTax Live, which gave customers a new way to interact with TurboTax’s CPA agents. I joined the team as a Consumer Insights Analyst and utilized customer-agent chat and phone verbatim to evaluate users’ holistic TurboTax experience, test the impact of new TurboTax initiatives and updates, and identify customers’ top needs and worries when the COVID-19 pandemic broke.

Identifying Friction Points in TurboTax

Customers who opted for a premium service could access support across a wide spectrum of topics through TurboTax Chat. In addition to monitoring customers’ most frequently asked questions and ensuring tax experts delivered top-tier customer service, TurboTax’s chat verbatim offered valuable insight into users’ TurboTax experience.

My role was to identify users’ biggest friction points in their tax filing journey. This involved weekly analysis of KPIs and customer-agent interactions, quickly identifying and validating directional trends, and creating and hosting research share-outs on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

As a result, I was able to pinpoint the biggest areas of opportunity in our holistic user experience (examples include product bugs, identifying dark patterns, and new tax laws that users needed extra support on). Additionally, my team’s research share-out cadence fostered a deeper sense of empathy among business stakeholders, allowing them to better understand customers’ experience and perspectives. 

Testing New Initiatives

Following new product updates, changes in tax laws mandated by the government, or revised procedures for our CPAs to adhere to, my team and I would be presented with hypotheses from stakeholders. Our goal was to learn the implications of these changes on users' experiences.

I closely collaborated with our business partners to comprehend each research goal, identified the specific scenarios affected by the hypothesis, selected the appropriate tools for capturing and quantifying the impacted cases and metrics, and devised a comprehensive approach for analyzing each distinct use case. The KPIs and customers-agent interactions that I monitored and analyzed offered us a clear view on the impact (or lack of impact) from each of the new updates.

  • In order to do this, I had to learn how to write SQL queries, become a master at Pivot Tables, and generate Tableau reports to be able to extract and analyze the appropriate data.

COVID-19 and the 2020 Stimulus

In early March of 2020, COVID-19 broke and the country went into lockdown. In early April, the government announced the COVID-19 Stimulus package.

Everyone in the world was so stressed and worried by the novel virus, and Intuit knew that customers were going to be confused and would be contacting TurboTax agents to try to understand what was happening. The company wanted to learn what were users’ main questions and concerns at the time so we could provide for our customers - what we didn’t know was that our work would have a national reach.

I was presented with the choice to join the COVID-19 Impact Project and eagerly joined seeing how it could make a large, positive impact in the lives of numerous people. In my dedicated team, we compiled customer chat and phone records pertaining to COVID-19, the filing extension, and Stimulus checks which enabled us to dissect and identify citizens’ most common questions and concerns. I also spearheaded the daily reports that highlighted users’ most common questions to business stakeholders.

As a result, we were able to help the business prioritize which pieces of information did customers need the most. Within 5 days, Intuit launched the Stimulus FAQ page, which became the top searched for page on Google in April 2020. In total, my team was able to provide insights into over 70k customer interactions that came through TurboTax alone.

Additionally, the company was able to see how customers’ needs and questions changed as more information was being released from the government. The data that my team collected was also shared with the IRS to help influence the process and communication used for the Economic Impact Payments. 

Conclusion

Getting to work on Intuit’s TurboTax on the Business Insights Intelligence team was the first time I got to take my skills and background as a User Researcher and apply it through the lens of a Business Analyst. It was also the first time that I participated in rapid research cycles with an Agile process - with sometimes daily turnarounds. I also got to take pride in the fact that my work got to impact a product and resource that was used by so many in the country. 

It was also my first time having to adjust to working from home during a global pandemic.

But with so many firsts at here at Intuit, I am happy to say that it was such an amazing experience getting to learn from a company that is so design centered, as well as getting to experience such a healthy and friendly company culture. So for now, I say goodbye to my time at Intuit but am looking forward to the day that I get to cross paths with such an amazing company again (spoiler alert: we did meet again, and oh boy was I pushed).

Thanks for reading :)