The QuickBooks Team Blog

QB POS Product – Ease and Power

Folks –

We are in the middle of our development cycle for the next version of QB POS and I wanted to share my thinking on the balance of ease and power.  At the core of our product strategy is that QB POS is going to continue to grow by being the easiest product to learn and use that also provides the power a retailer needs to gain insight into their business.

We need to be easy to learn and use because the alternative for most retailers is a combination of a cash register, pencil and paper, spreadsheets and intuition. These solutions are easy to learn and use as they are flexible and allow the retailer to use them they way they want. If a product is not easy, the retailer will stop using it or only use the most basic features of the product because the time to learn more advanced capabilities would be too much.

In addition to being easy, we need to provide the power to give retailers more insight into their business so that customers feel the price they paid was worth it.  If a product does not deliver better insight, the retailer may continue to use the product but will not recommend it to others.

We could make a product very easy to use by limiting what it does. Or we could provide a lot of features so that those who invested a lot time to learn how to use these advanced capabilities would reap a lot of value.  Our goal is to do both at the same time … QB POS’ success in the market – 45,000 retailers and counting – gives me confidence we’re on the right track.

The only way to achieve our goal of helping independent retailers thrive is to listen to customers and non-customers and take action based on that feedback. The product management and development team gets input from our support and sales organizations, from usability and follow-me-home testing, and directly from customers and prospects that helps us pinpoint areas of the product – both hardware and software – that need to be reworked.

I’d be interested in your thoughts in how we are doing in meeting both goals.

Thanks,

Steven

QuickBooks Retailer Team Mission

Folks -

I realized in talking with our team over the past few months that we needed a clear statement of purpose, a rallying cry.  This post explains what we created.

As I thought about what the retailers I have talked to told me about their lives and their work, several clear challenges were clear:

• Large retailers are forcing down pricing on many, many goods
• Consumers are searching the web for selection and price before deciding to go to a local store
• Electronic transaction options - mainly credit cards, but also debit and gift cards - are expected for most purchases
• Most retailers are still using either pencil and paper or a cash register to manage their business, providing little information on inventory or customers that can help the retailer make better decisions

My summary - in a world of ever increasing competition and customer expectations, the old tools that retailers relied on to keep cash safe don't give them the information they need to provide the level of service and efficiency that will keep them delivering better than a large retailer.

Our team's role, building on the QuickBooks focus of empowering the individuals in small business, is therefore to "Help independent retailers thrive".  There are 4 million retail locations in the US and most of the them are small businesses - we can help them do better, whether that means spend less time in the store after the customers leave, have a better selection of products for customers, help scarce cash go farther by buying the right amount of inventory, bringing customers back by providing better service, help them offer electronic payment options, get online ... the opportunities are vast to improve the lives of retail store owners.

The team is fired up by this and it will shape the way we approach all of our interactions with customers.

I'm interested in your thoughts.

Thanks,Steven

QB POS & Retailer Segment – Reflections on 2005

Before the holidays, I told my team that I would start a blog to provide another way to directly interact with customers.  Since I’m the only one in the office today, I have the time to sit down and write our team’s first entry.

Brief background on me - I have been at Intuit about 10 years in a variety of positions including stints in corporate development and business development, a co-founder and leader of the Quicken Insurance business during the dot com days, and a few leadership roles in the QuickBooks business.  I am currently the business leader for the QuickBooks Retailer Segment which includes QB Point of Sale (QB POS).  My responsibility is to ensure that we solve the most important needs of retailers, to create great experiences for retailers across all of the QuickBooks products and services, to build and maintain a passionate and talented team, and to deliver revenue and profit growth for the company.

The team has made some big improvements in two key areas this past year – customer support (self-service and phone) and the ease of using the QB POS product.  I am going to write mainly about phone customer support in this post and  write about self-service support options and ease of use of QB POS in a later installment.

For the first six months of 2005 we were struggling to answer calls in a timely manner and most of the phone agents were brand new.  The situation is completely different now ... our customer support team is now staffed at a level where we can answer the phone quickly and they have had more training and sufficient time on the phones to handle questions as volume of POS v5 sales ramp up.

The retailer support leadership has energized the team, invested in enough headcount, and provided time for learning and training.  We have different ways to tell how we are doing for customers when they contact us for help and those indicators are headed in the right direction.  For example, I just looked at our service level metrics for the POS phone support team and saw that yesterday we answered the phone in less than half a minute on average and the longest anyone customer waited was 8 minutes.

We are also contact customers to see how we are doing in answering their questions … the leadership team in Tucson did away with the survey at the end of the phone call and replaced it with a brief questionnaire we give to a sample of customers a few weeks after their support call.  The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and we have received feedback on our need to improve the experience when the customer calls about a problem they are having (vs a "how do I" call).

This is an effort that is not finished yet … customers contact me when we screw something up (it is often a policy or process issue and not an agent issue which we then fix) and our listening posts also highlight areas that we need to improve such as:

• handling issues that cut involve multiple QuickBooks offerings (financial software, POS and merchant services for example);
• providing consistent answers regardless of which agent you talk to; and
• offering better self-help options ... we've made improvements there, but still have a ways to go ... as an example, check out v0.5 of a QB POS support page www.quickbooks.com/support/pos/

I welcome your feedback.

Steven