TurboTax Full Service at Intuit

Summary:

In 2021, Intuit launched TurboTax Full Service - a new experience where a tax expert is assigned to you to file your tax return. Given its novel nature, senior leadership wanted several members of the Business Insights team to monitor and hold weekly report outs on Full Service’s customer experience.

This case study will examine Full Service’s original design and the process gaps my Business Insights team identified, the immediate remedy that was put in place, and how the user insights I uncovered in the experience drove various research initiatives. This project is NDA protected so I will not be revealing all the details.

Full Service Original Design & Process Gaps

Full Service could be summarized into 3 major parts:

At each of these phases, customers and experts would connect over a video call or through a chat system to communicate.

It’s also worth noting that in the beginning of the tax season, majority of customers will be in the Onboarding phase, and as the tax season continues, most customers’ progress will shift over time as well. Additionally, Full Service was launched as a small pilot in the prior year to test the experience. 

My team’s original task was to evaluate Full Service’s holistic customer experience by observing user interactions and monitoring Full Service’s KPIs to provide weekly updates to senior leadership. Our weekly leadership share outs covered:

  • KPI performances

  • An iterative customer journey map based on our mixed-methodology findings

  • Clips of the agent-customer interactions to showcase insights into the holistic user journey

Without going into too many details or technical terms, my team discovered that the Full Service Funnel was plagued with “leaks” and "“debris” that negatively impacted customers’ experience and tax experts’ ability to serve their customers well. 

  • A “leak” was when a Full Service customer tries to contact their assigned tax agent, but mistakenly ends up in another support queue

  • “Debris” was when a non-Full Service related topic came through the Full Service support queue. “Debris” resulted in Full Service agents being unable to answer the customer’s question and having to transfer them to the appropriate agent.

To make things more chaotic, the leaks that we had discovered actually was negatively impacting other TurboTax experiences as well. We needed to patch the leaks ASAP.

Immediate Remedy

Shortly after my team discovered the leaks, and senior leadership saw how they could heavily impact the rest of TurboTax’s business, the product team implemented a short term remedy for the 2020 tax year: a new service category called Full Service Triage* to catch all of these leaks.

  • If a customer calls into TurboTax and the customer is registered as a Full Service customer, they’ll be automatically routed to the Full Service Triage experience. 

To everyone’s surprise, Full Service Triage became a mine of user insights.

Full Service Triage Driving Research Initiatives

What took Intuit by surprise when Full Service was fully launched was how needy customers were to their tax agents. Customers often called in for various reasons, and the Full Service Triage queue captured all of the unplanned Full Service leaks and issues could be found here, and everyone wanted to know what were the main issues, why were they happening, and what steps could the company take to prevent them from happening again.

Identifying Experience Gaps Within Full Service

By the end of the 2020 tax season, there were over 50,000 Full Service Triage calls. This meant that there were multiple experience gaps, either in the product or the service, that were causing users to come to the Triage queue.

In order to quickly identify the call themes, I trained an AI powered speech analytics model to identify call themes and sentiment by analyzing 600 user interactions to map out key words and phrases (400 initially to train the model in 2 weeks, and an additional 50 weekly interactions as the tax season continued to update and refine the model).

  • I focused on identifying why were customers calling, what did the tax agent do to remedy the situation, what was the outcome of the call, and what were customers’ sentiment at the end.

My analysis revealed 4 consistent experience gaps that appeared throughout the tax season and drove various initiatives to address these gaps.

Exploratory Research Initiatives

As the analyst who oversaw customers’ Full Service experience, I had the opportunity to join various initiatives to address the Full Service gaps my initial research uncovered. Each initiative had varying levels of complexity, some were a simple fix while others required further research to understand the challenges. For example:

  • An easy fix we addressed in the beginning of the tax season was making it easier for customers to leave Full Service

  • A bigger research challenge was understanding why users were complaining about how long Full Service was taking. Some customers had their returns completed in 2 weeks and said the experience was very fast, while other customers had their returns completed in a few days but complained it was too slow. Where were customers getting their expectations from?

  • Were tax agents being set up for success?

As a Business Insights Analyst, I had access to our data lakes and was able to pull various KPIs and telemetric data. On top of conducting qualitative research (observing Full Service customers, analyzing Tax Agent focus groups, and conducting desk research on common tax scenarios), I was using SQL to query specific customer data for analysis.

The quantitative data I was querying allowed me to build out directional customer journey maps on a large scale, which helped stakeholders understand the user experience, and also use to validate hypotheses we had on customers’ pain points.

Evaluative Research

Now that we had a better understanding of the experience gaps, product began launching controlled service experiments to see if the changes would improve the baseline experience.

I was responsible for querying the correct users who were part of the experiment and analyzing if their call interactions, product experience, or user behaviors improved. If the outcomes of the experiment were a success, the change went live across Full Service.

However an important constraint we had to take into account was that every day, the tax deadline got closer: In the beginning of tax season, we were able to make big iterations on Full Service without major consequence. But as the tax deadline got closer (and the procrastinators began filing), we had to adjust how we were addressing user pain points. After the tax deadline though, the product team was able to run a small pilot of the revamped TurboTax Full Service experience, and I was able to study how this redesigned experience compared to the original service.

Due to this project being NDA protected, I won’t be covering my exact findings.

Conclusion

In summary, this case study sheds light on the journey of TurboTax Full Service from its pilot service to its next iteration. Our tiger team of Product Managers, developers, Business Insights Analysts, and a UX Researcher meticulously, analyzed, and intervened to address critical process gaps in Full Service. 

The Full Service Triage emerged as a valuable tool for capturing user insights and understanding their needs in real-time. By delving into users' pain points, conducting root cause analysis, and collaborating with cross-functional teams, we paved the way for iterative improvements and a revamped TurboTax Full Service experience. While specific findings are NDA protected, the success lies in the continuous adaptation and enhancement of Full Service, ensuring a seamless and satisfying user experience during tax season and beyond.