Anyone is welcome to ask questions or leave comments in the Add a comment box at the bottom of the page. Those with first-hand knowledge of the events at Intuit can edit the content of the page itself...just finish your addition with your first name in italics to identify yourself and allow the use of the first person. This page started off as part of the text of the article I wrote for HBR, hence the many paragraphs written by me. [Intuit founder Scott Cook]
This is the story of the user contribution system journey by one company, Intuit.
As a member of the boards of eBay and Amazon in the late 1990s, I was exposed to user contribution through the work of Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, and Meg Whitman. But the concept seemed rare and specialized, so I missed seeing its broader application and value. [Intuit founder, Scott]
I started out thinking it couldn’t work. As founder Pierre Omidyar and newly hired CEO Meg Whitman described eBay to me a year and a half after its launch, I couldn’t believe people would actually buy and sell this way. But you couldn’t deny the numbers and the explosive growth which proved otherwise. So I agreed to join their board. [Scott]
It happened again a year later at my other outside board. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos closed a board meeting by mentioning that the Internet retailer would soon supplement the professional book and movie reviews that appeared on nearly every Amazon product page with reviews written by anyone who felt like posting one. After the meeting, I said to Jeff, “It’s your call, but are you crazy? Why would anyone waste their good time to write a review for folks they’ll never meet? If by some remote chance reviews appear, why would anyone rely on the opinion of some yahoo they’ve never met and whose opinion they have no reason to trust?” He didn’t listen. A year later found that I like others regularly used and trusted Amazon’s Customer Reviews, preferring them over the critics’ reviews. [Scott]
Twice wrong, but never in doubt; I was lucky to learn from minds more open than mine. As again happened in 2003 when an Intuit engineer from our Boston lab taught me over lunch about wikis and this thing called Wikipedia – where I was astonished at the quality of user-generated articles. [Scott]
When our customer service team at Intuit began user contribution experiments – online support forums moderated by employee enthusiasts – I, along with others on our leadership team, really didn’t get the significance of what they were up to.
Over time, though, I began to see the contribution concept that underpinned these revolutionary successes. Reinforced by Tim O’Reilly – who taught me that user contribution is the most important concept in Web 2.0, the moniker he coined – I knew we had to act. [Scott]
Early success
At our annual off-site in 2005, I put this question to the company’s top 300 executives: How might we leverage user contribution at Intuit, both to enhance existing businesses and to create new ones? Two executives in our Plano, Texas, division began to think about how to solve a common problem faced by professional tax preparers – getting answers to obscure questions. The result was a quickly cobbled-together wiki/forum site where tax preparers could contribute both questions and answers for the benefit of other tax preparers. Just 33 days after the executive off-site, TaxAlmanac was launched. Today, it has 170,000 pages, drawing on the collective expertise of thousands of tax professionals, and is used by 400,000 unique visitors – about equal to the number of tax preparers in the country. Tax preparers benefit from expertise that’s free. Intuit benefits when visitors then buy our tax prep software – customer acquisition at almost zero cost. [Scott]
However, despite my evangelizing, the idea of contribution systems wasn’t taking off elsewhere within the organization. TaxAlmanac was a small island in a sea of indifference. [Scott]
A major setback
I then resurrected an idea that had been proposed several years before by an Intuit engineer: a website with user-generated reviews of local businesses to help folks find a good plumber, car dealer, or restaurant, linked to our Quicken financial software products. It seemed like a sure bet, so we put a big team on it, and in late 2005, we launched Zipingo. But the site failed to attract a critical mass of users, and we shuttered it in August 2007. [Scott]
What went wrong? We made mistakes that stemmed from the difference between traditional products and contribution systems. User contribution is first of all about the users and their content. We failed to nurture and encourage early contributors, and we got distracted creating our own content – ancillary information like business addresses for the listings. [Scott]
Zipingo’s failure hurt. I stopped pushing big team efforts to develop new contribution systems at Intuit. But even as I pulled back, small contribution-system projects started sprouting up. [Scott]
Gaining traction
One of our engineering leaders conceived the idea of embedding a Q&A community into a product itself – that is, creating a user forum on every page of TurboTax, with questions and answers relevant to the topic of the particular page. Many were wary of the idea, and some were even hostile. I encouraged the group’s efforts, but in an echo of my own skepticism about Amazon’s user reviews years earlier, I wondered silently whether people striving to finish their own taxes would stop to answer some stranger’s questions. [Scott]
Working with the support of his division manager, the engineer’s team of three built the system and tested it in the least popular version of TurboTax Online in January 2007. Just five weeks into the initial test, one-third of the questions posed already had answers. Crucially, our internal tax experts were pleased by the quality of the answers, which seemed to be self-correcting as other users refined them. TurboTax Live Community, as it’s called, was the kind of clear success I’d been seeking. Live Community systems have spread to our other divisions and are inspiring more contribution experiments. [Scott]
Yet wariness persists. This year, when the TurboTax marketing team decided to solicit and post all user reviews, unedited, on a prominent link from the product’s home page, I blanched and took a deep breath. Again a surprise: The vast bulk of reviews are so positive that it looks as if we’ve posted only the good ones (which, I hasten to add, is not the case). Once again, we’re learning from that most reliable of sources – our customers. [Scott]
See also
<< Where UCS can help - production
Getting your company started with UCS >>
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.