In matters of tax and financial management, brand building doesn’t come easily – to most the subject isn’t the most alluring. Intuit works diligently to remain a bona fide leader in this field; their accounting solutions are used by more professionals than any other in North America. When traditional market research methods became too sluggish to keep pace with the company’s needs, Intuit turned to Vision Critical to build an online community panel to restore the company’s ability to gather and respond to client input faster.
Each new year ushers in a wide range of changes to tax codes and reporting requirements, so vendors like Intuit need to stay incredibly nimble. An increasingly competitive industry where customers continually demand faster and simpler preparation of their financial and tax reports requires Intuit to constantly develop new products to maintain their edge.
The duration of the traditional research process restricted Intuit’s ability to be dexterous and responsive; the data they had worked so hard to collect was stale and no longer actionable by the time they received it.
Intuit and Vision Critical built the Accounting Professional Research Panel comprising accountants who rely on their software products. The market research team knew that the rapid, accessible and sophisticated findings of a community panel would yield more reliable insights, leading to more appropriate product development.
The company’s Product Managers trust results from the community panel to guide the direction of product engineering. They relish the opportunity to quickly and easily translate customer requests and feedback into tangible product changes. The community panel findings also go directly to Intuit’s business and senior leadership teams during their annual planning.
Intuit’s panel gives it the ability to stay nimble, doing more research faster than ever and ensures the ‘Voice of the Customer’ has pride of place throughout the organization. While reducing their budget was not initially an objective, overall market research spend has dropped while the number of projects has increased.
The flexibility offered through the panel is also widely cherished within the business and monthly omnibus surveys are run, grouping questions from various departments instead of each having to brief a full project. You have a question or a curiosity? The panel is the first place to turn. “The Product Management team really loves this capability,” notes Rothdeutsch. Vision Critical’s Community Panel technology has increased efficiency and created a revolutionary form of dialogue between Intuit and their clients.