Intuit • QuickBooks Live Collaboration
Improving document collection completion for bookkeepers from 38% to 90%
QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping is an online bookkeeping service that connects small businesses customers with trusted, QuickBooks-certified virtual bookkeepers, promising a result of getting their books compliant. However, this result would take longer than expected because bookkeepers have to manually identify documents needing customer upload and take action on them based on inputs provided by hand. This results in a poor experience since customers continued to be burdened with work, despite paying money to outsource it to QuickBooks.
Collaboration between bookkeepers and customers was plagued by gaps in QuickBooks' interface and processes.
After numerous interviews with current QuickBooks Live customers, I discovered that many customers spent a lot of time in QuickBooks trying to find where their bookkeeper needed their attention, which made them feel scattered and lacking focus. To solve this, I developed a solution with a hypothesis that if there was a way for customer to visually identify which documents needed attention, customers could easily identify the problem and fix them faster.
On one side of collaboration: I interviewed customers receiving full service from QuickBooks certified bookkeepers.
On the other side of collaboration: I interviewed Bookkeepers providing accounting services to their clients.
A detailed journey map of the collaboration process captured the various steps taken towards 100% document management.
Communication system needs major improvement... Why not just add a DIRECT link to the comment/request so that we know exactly what is needed right away rather than force us to spend valuable time searching for something!? Or, just write it in the email so we can immediately see it!
- QuickBooks Live Customer
Rethinking how experts collaborate with customers
Working closely with the Intuit Expert Team and the Design Systems Team, I explored ways to make it much easier for bookkeepers to pinpoint rejected documents and communicate effectively to customers. I also looked at improving the overall usability of the experience by making improvements to request interface, upload file process, and notifications.
I improved the overall usability of the request details view by making the primary calls to action omnipresent, and the comment section more prominent.
I explored different ways to point to items that needed customer attention.
I eventually landed on a status system consisting of a concise label explaining the reason for rejection and a colored dot. Ultimately to simplify, I narrowed down to 4 different combinations.
In the QuickBooks expert view, I updated the interface to include the new status system. This also required a change in process which the service team would need to learn and adopt.
QuickBooks bookkeepers can apply the new document status in multiple areas of the customer service tool.
Reducing customer confusion to encourage quick response
With a new visual system and interface for marking rejected documents, I finalized the designs of the full experience of expert and customer collaboration on QuickBooks Live. I also worked closely with the QuickBooks Service Team to detail how the interface has changed and how the review process would need to change to update the service for the tens of thousands of Intuit expert bookkeepers.
The main Live Bookkeeping dashboard shows all of the customer tasks and which ones require attention.
At the request detail view, the customer can easily see which documents shared with their bookkeper are accepted or rejected.
When a bookkeeper rejects one or more documents, the customer is notified by email.
The customer can see all of the documents they share with their bookkeeper and the accept/reject status.
Conclusion
My solutions had a positive impact on the service by eliminating customer work to get to value, and enabling bookkeepers to deliver quality books consistently at scale. The changes to the experience made it much easier for customers to understand which documents to fix, resulting in more customers responding to bookkeeper requests in less than 24 hours. This led to more customers achieving their expected milestones faster, since bookkeepers were resolving issues with less churn.
