Deb Eastman: Intuit's Experience Using NPS to Drive Design and User Experience

Barry Saik shared the experience of Intuit in using NPS to drive product design and user experience.

As anyone who has read The Ultimate Question knows, Intuit has embraced NPS as a key metric of the business. When getting started, they debated whether to invest in competitive benchmarking.  Barry’s advice to anyone starting on the NPS journey is to invest the time in mapping yourself relative to your competitors on the growth vs. NPS charts from Fred’s book, The Ultimate Question. 

Another best practice Barry stresses is to use your verbatim comments. When reviewing verbatim comments in more detail you can gleam insights that your survey may not produce. Some tips he offered:

• Categorize verbatim comments, ranking themes to provide further analysis of common concerns or opportunities. He shared their own experiences on how the verbatim comments are used to drive product development.
• Intuit uses a product from Informative that allows the users to “vote” on responses from other customers. This allows an organization to find the top of mind issues they may not have previously offered as options on the survey.
• Don’t let your teams suggest it takes too much time. Print out the comments and comb through them for that nuggets your customers share.

It’s important as well to look at issues that can affect your data. He shared a number of charts that breaks down their NPS scores by product line and seasonality. Understanding the context of your customer’s responses increases your ability to use the data in a relevant manner. A prime example we can all relate to was their NPS scores relative to the tax season. By time-analysis they have found that NPS declined as the tax season progresses since early users are likely to have returns vs. those of us that wait till the last minute to write that check to Uncle Sam.

Another way Intuit is leading the pack in building Promoters is through their community site, The Inner Circle.  This is an online community where they can engage with promoters in a richer way.  They have found the members enjoy community participation and sharing their ideas with other customers, giving them a great community for building promoters and collecting insights for product development. An unexpected side effect of this community is a 4.5 star rating on Amazon largely driven from customers that had early access to products.

Intuit has clearly embraced customer centricity and is seeing the results. One of my favorite comments from Barry today was “If you do the right thing and listen to people, they will get on your side and help you out.” Too many organization are doing what they think is the right thing for their business and need to re-engineer around doing the right thing for their customers.