BlurNotes: Intuit’s Kira Wampler

[Note--BlurNotes is a series of excerpts from research and interviews I'm conducting for my next book, Blurring Boundaries, covering online enterprise communities.]

There's something that feels like social media in Intuit's story, although it begins long before there was such a term or even the concept. In 1981, Scott Cook, then a marketing executive for Proctor & Gamble, the world's largest consumer products company is sitting in his kitchen watching his wife pay the bills. He notices all the hassle of writing the checks by hand, then entering the info in a register. Every month she is entering the same data all over again.

That gives him an idea for an electronic checkbook, that will reside on a computer desktop and store personal financial information. It becomes Quicken and Quicken becomes Intuit, the world's leading small business and personal finance company. Last year sales reached $3.1 billion.

Kira Wampler, thinks that the incident that became the company has something to do with why Intuit is so good at social media and online communities. "We began by watching a user and figuring out how to make it easier." Kira is group marketing manager for online engagements for Intuit's small business division in Menlo Park, CA. She heads up a team of 19, all of them engaged in social media as a core part of their jobs.

Intuit, like just about every software company did just easily transform from a company that sold boxes off a retailer shelf to a company whose transactions mostly take place online and whose core focus has shifted from moving SKUs to being host and leader to more online small business communities than any other company.

Ray Wang, a partner at Altimeter Group, an online strategies consulting group says that because of the communities, "Intuit owns the small business customer," a feat that conventional wisdom insists is impossible because the category is too fragmented, decision makers are too busy running their own businesses, they are slow to adopt technology and they spend as little money on it as they possibly can.

But Intuit hits them right in their checkbooks and in their tax reporting, a common denominator for all small businesses. And from their it has expanded into other areas, with a couple of strategic acquisitions. First, it acquired StepUp, a service that makes it easier for small business inventories to show up in a Google search and then Homestead,Inc. a roll-your-own website service.

What Kira demonstrated during a three-hour dinner interview is that Intuit's strategy has evolved through online communities and social  media. It has totally immersed itself in understanding and serving small business users.

“Small businesses are Intuit’s oxygen," she told me, " If they’re not healthy, we’re not breathing. It isn’t either the customer or the shareholder. The two are intricately linked. There’s a direct correlation between the customer’s happiness and our revenue," and she said the customer has extensive data to prove it.

We covered numerous issues. I'm very much interested in showing how boundaries between customers and companies are blurring in numerous areas, product being the most important.

Like all the companies, I'm profiling Intuit is public. That means the SEC restricts what companies say about products not yet introduced. So how do you get customers to tell you what they want in your next introduction?

Kira explained how you can dance without stepping on regulatory toes. "There is no regulation that makes it unlawful to have conversations with customers and to ask them how you can do better,: she told me.  What they cannot do is recognize in public that a customer has suggested a feature, design element or function and announce it will be incorporated. That recognition, however, can be made after the product is announced.

They also can fix mistakes with unprecedented speed because of customer comments.  When Quickbooks 2010 [QB10] came out there were complaints about a feature that popped up ads for other products when you booted up QB10.

Customers hated it. Word first broke in Amazon community conversations. Intuit got the message. They deleted the unwanted feature in exactly 45 days, which might be a record for a large enterprise software company changing a product, particularly based on user response.

She said that most companies focus on listening which has its limits. Like most large companies involved in social media, Intuit use Radian 6 to monitor product and company mentions. But the objective is not to just show you're listening it to "demonstrate that the customer is actually being heard." For example, when a customer complains, someone from the company needs to come back and say,  “'Sounds like a crappy experience. Tell me more about it.'”

Intuit got the shift from packaged software to online fairly early, offering their first online product in 2001. But it wasn't all that fast to understand social media or realize the business value in placing the customer at the center of online community efforts. Until 2006 you had a chance of getting fired at Intuit by blogging about your job or even talking to a blogger.

Intuit also was slow to understand the business benefit of superior support. When they first offered online customer communities they tried charging customers for the support, which went over about as well as you can imagine.

A watershed change came when Kira met Anita Campbell  whose Small Business Trends is among the the best known and most respected small business blogs. She invited Anita to hang out for a day at Intuit and just talk about how the blogosphere worked. It changed Intuit’s vie.  Overnight, blogger outreach changed from taboo to desirable.

Perhaps because she reports to a traditional marketer, Kira see less division between social media and traditional marketing. To her they are stitched together seamlessly. When a product ad runs on TV, Kira told me, she sees an immediate uptick on Twitter where people started asking about the advertised product.

Once they dipped their toes into the social media ocean Intuit got immersed quickly. It is active on all the public platforms and has its own network of password protected communities.

According to Kira,  the relatively rapid company-changing conversion was because "feedback is essential to company culture and DNA. She said the company use NetPromoter surveys and is essentially interested in the answer to a single customer question, that begins with the words, "Are you likely to recommend..."

But, she observed, there are two kinds of feedback: answers to question you ask and answers to the questions you don't ask. Net Promoter helps them with the former and that is useful, but "social is what we get when we don't ask," and those answers are more candid and often delivered with greater passion.

"When you put the two answer sets together, you get something that is transformative, something that starts telling you why a customer will or will not recommend your products and that is obviously game changing," she said.

I asked her about the Jerry Maguire challenge, from the 1996 movie: "Show me the money!" This is the ROI, question that has been posed by social media for business doubters.

Kira said there is unquestionable evidence that social media is having positive financial impact on impact, but perhaps the questioners should be looking more at the top line where revenue is counted, rather than the bottom line where profits are the consideration.

In short, social media at Intuit is driving growth which is measured in sales. "We make more money in revenues than we spend on programs. Our marketing ratio is positive."

I tried to get her to share as much as a public company representative could share She told me the amount was not yet huge but it was "much more than lunch money."

I was relieved to hear that. n the interest of transparency, Kira picked up the dinner check.