How TurboTax is Using Social Media to Help You With Your Taxes

Originally posted on the Tree.com Money and Finance Channel

TurboTax is the top rated, top selling software designed to help with tax preparation, and one of the most visible and popular tax prep programs on the market. Intuit, who has been providing small business solutions for more than 25 years, created TurboTax.

Intuit is responsible for not only TurboTax, but also other well known financial tools like Quicken and QuickBooks. Intuit also offers various other support and services for consumers and business, perhaps most interestingly a thriving online community. Intuit has pioneered the use of social media in helping consumers and businesses with tax preparation.

About 6 years ago, Intuit began promoting a beta testing program on the TurboTax website. Nearly 2,000 customers responded with interest in providing feedback to help improve TurboTax but there was no formal beta testing plan in place. Intuit got the ball rolling to create an online community in an effort to engage these customers and get their input.

The TurboTax live community is nearly 4 years old, and basically connects customers with questions to the answers they need. The TurboTax community has helped nearly 4 million customers.

Other customers, in a peer-to-peer support role, provide answers. But Intuit is heavily involved as well. 85% of the people answering questions on the TurboTax community are Intuit employees ranging from vice presidents, to engineers and marketing employees.

The TurboTax community is also supported by a Twitter account, @TeamTurboTax. This account is run by an 80-person team internal to Intuit, helping customers get the answers they need as quickly as possible via direct engagement.

You can participate in the TurboTax community via Twitter, or via direct links from within the TurboTax products. There’s even an interactive list of the top questions.

To support the TurboTax community further, Intuit created the Inner Circle. The Inner Circle community features blogs, forums, an idea exchange, and polls and surveys. It’s free for users to sign up for access, and they receive front of the line support privileges in addition to access to the community tools. Inner Circle currently has about 25,000 members, and these members are responsible for nearly 35 product enhancements to the TurboTax product. So, Intuit is not only engaging its customers, it’s listening to them as well.

Intuit’s use of social media and online community has been groundbreaking in the financial software industry. Even outside of financial software, few companies seem to be engaging customers on the levels that Intuit is. Many companies are still jumping on the social media bandwagon and launching online communities, a wagon that Intuit has been on for years.