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How does Intuit evaluate your performance

This am, someone asked me ‘how do you like working for Intuit?

To be honest, I feel as if I am working for our users, especially those involved in our online community websites:Quicken and QuickBooks 

They are the ones who set our priorities for improving the site. They are the ones who give us feedback on what is working and what is not working. And they are the ones who evaluate our performance.

In fact, when my Intuit manager asks for a list of coworkers he can contact for my 360 yearly review, I will provide him a list of our users as well. Or, just tell him to contact a handful and ask them how they think I am doing.

It drives me crazy that most managers don’t look outside the company for feedback on their team.
Key Plays:

1. User involvement is more than content
2. User involvement is helping set the priorities for product development
3. User involvement means evalutaiting Intuit’s employees’ peformance
4. User involvement can help managers figure out how they can coach their employees.

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In The Trenches

 

Some key plays for building a good community. All of which take place in the trenches.

1. Launch and learn – each team  member must needs contact with users
2. Understand the importance of sharing learnings directly to the developers (better yet, let them hear it from users)
3. User involvement in the development process never stops, never ends (especially as more and more web products are developed)
4. Community is a great place to test new product development processes
5. Change is never constant, it is always happening
6. It is great to collaborate with your heavy users and most valuable customers, but don’t leave out other users, especially since you need to develop to the lowest common denominator, the less experienced and knowledgeable users
7. Verbatims are just as important as ‘numbers and scores’ (Yes, everyone on the team should read them!)
8. Find a users problem and solve it well!
9. Make sure to do a post mortem after your failures and learn from them.
10. Solutions are not always transferable from one product/service to another. (you can not plug in a previous approach to ratings to this group of users

And remember: This all sounds easier than it is. It takes hard work and constant effort.

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Learning to listen

Influenced by Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss what Matters Most
by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen, Roger Fisher

Born out of the Harvard Negotiation Project was a study that looked at how people handle difficult conversations — personal or work related. Almost all these moments create stress in some manner. And it is particulary challenging when you are responding to angry customers or frustrated users. So, we try and leverage the approach in order to pay attention to our own feelings (what we really want to tell the customer — after all, we are human) so that we stick to our guiding principle that we are solving for the customer. It is also a useful tool when working with teammates or a manager. The basic premise is to divide a piece a paper into two columns with the right hand column stating what was said or what you think would occur if you had a back and forth discussion with a user. Then in the left hand column write down what you were thinking or feeling (or what you think you would feel) during the conversation. Then step back and thik about what got your to what was written in the left hand column.

Some good questions to ask yourself:

– What was / will be my goal when I respond to a customer
– What assumptions am I making about the other person
– What will be the costs of interacting with that person or user that way (for us, it could be big and start a chain reaction of negative feedback)
– What can I learn from the left hand column

Some areas to consider when engaging with others:  – Understand what happened to the user?
– Understand their emotional state? How frustrated they are, for example?
– Understand exactly what the user is saying and if you get a sense that nothing everything is being shared, then probe.
– If a user says you are useless, don’t loose it — and know that the discussion board or a blog is an opportunity to share ideas, information, etc.
– As Stephen Covey says ‘seek to understand before being understood’

(http://www.franklincovey.com/fc/library_and_resources/article_library/the_seven_habits_of_highly_effective_people/seven_habits_revisited__seven_unique_human_endowments

As Covey points out “The root cause of almost all people problems is the basic communication problem: people do not listen with empathy. They listen from within their autobiography. They lack the skill and attitude of empathy. They need approval; they lack courage. Within their frame of reference, they say, “What can I do to please that person. He has this high need for control. Wait a minute, I’m the manager in control. I didn’t come to listen I came to tell. When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.” The ability to listen first requires restraint, respect, and reverence. And the ability to make yourself understood requires courage and consideration. On the continuum, you go from fight and flight instincts to mature two-way communication where courage is balanced with consideration.”
-Understand that there are limits to the type of assistance you can give a user
-Use inquiry to establish a stronger connection with the user — and also to just get more information from the user so you can help them better.

If a moderator works on engaging users — participants in the community will see this and eventually adopt a more discussion oriented behavior.

Selling top down and bottoms up (Part III)

Selling Online Community plan to Sr. Mgmt. Part III

 It was important to address any concerns privacy and security had about employees sharing any company secrets. So, we would eventually take a page from their internal training program and use it on our training program.  In working with legal and privacy, we developed training program for employees, an employee policy, a process for monitoring what ‘people’ said about our products and services on thee web, and contingency plans about what we would do if there was an issue.  Then we met with CEO and his direct reports. We basically had 20 minutes to sell the idea of online communities. It had come to the point, where we need management’s sign off. It was time to go from being a skunk works project to something the company would fully support. Our presentation covered the following areas:  

·       Indicate what the Community would solve for (again, be clear about the ‘WHAT’ ) The importance of speaking ‘their language’ and/or the company’s language can not be overemphasized·       Demonstrate that legal, privacy, finance had signed off

·       Explain proposed changes in the employment policy (we wanted to move from a ‘no participation in an Internet chat room strategy’ to a more open policy (will add link to actual policy shortly)

·       Outline a proposed opt-in training program training policy (there was a lot of discussion about whether or not employees should be required to participate in a training program. After several minutes of discussion, Steve Bennett, boiled everything down to “we hired these employees because we trust them, so why can’t we trust them to participate responsibly on the web and to decide whether or not they needed training. Ironically, it was the employees who were asking for the training program. We shared some emails from staff who wanted some advice on how to participate in the community when they learned about it. Their emails basically stated ‘I don’t want to post anything that would hurt the company or make them look stupid. A key point here: Intuit is not like a lot of
Silicon Valley companies. There is an incredible energy around doing what is right for the customer and doing it as a member of a team. While the word ‘team’ is not often used and the word ‘matrix’d is used to describe the culture, there exists very few office politics.

·       Provide examples of what users are already saying about Intuit on the Web ·       Define value to company, especially for the ecosystem (see Ecosystem chapter) and as a strategic advantage over competitors

·       Define criteria for success (ROI, etc.) 

·       Describe how they senior management would be part of the process — and how there would be few surprises

·       Present an internal communications plan

·       Present a plan on how you plan to work with individual business unit leaders  We also presented the desire for the community team to sit with the product development team and for it to be a separate line item in the budget (more)

The next step was to talk to the business line leaders…

More on this next time..

Musical Chairs

   In most companies, the Online Community team sits either with Customer Support or in Marketing. Sometimes they move the group around. One deay in Customer Service. The next day (or year) in Marketing.

When we were forming our team, I specifically requested that we be placed in the product management group because:

– More and more companies would leverage user created content and integrate it into their products

– it would be easier organizationally to deliver user feedback and comments to our developers

– it would be easier to convince our product managers to participate in online communities

– the in-product help team already sat in product management and it order to scale the amount of content they product and keep up with our rapidly increasing portfolio of products, we needed to depend on our users to provide content. (this was called assisted self-service help).

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Another weekend – designing a playbook

Should Online Communities be part of Word of Mouth Programs

As a member of the Word of Mouth Association, I feel a little internal conflict writing this.

So here’s my confession: I think word of mouth programs and online communities have similar goals, such as getting users to recommend their products, but ‘how’ they achieve these goals is vastly different. Very different.

And I prefer to approach things the way (I think) a good Online Community manager should approach them…

Online community managers should focus on create a good customer experience!!

Whereas Word of Mouth explicitly tries to influence customers, online communities try to implicitly influence users (customers, prospects, small businesses, etc.). So what does implicitly influence mean? Basically, I look at our job at Intuit is to build the infrastructure to facilitate online interaction (via discussion boards, blogs, podcasts, etc.). And explicitly means ‘encouraging users to promote your products.’

In other words, if you create a great user experience (leveraging all the tools, processes and learning we have at Intuit) and a great product, hopefully users will recommend and promote you.

All of this fits in the philosophy for how to manage our QuickBooks and Quicken Online Communities. We basically do not allow any solicitation on the site, except in a restricted area. So, wouldn’t we be contradicting ourselves if we tried to sell on the community site and didn’t let the real owners of the community site, our users, promote their goods and services.

Thoughts?

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Virgina Tech

My thoughts, prayers and condolences go out to all those directly affected by the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Grassroots and Top Down (Part II)

More on selling internally. Continued from previous post:

Remember. All of this takes place in 2004.

Before we launched the QuickBooks Online Community, it was clear that the company had limited experience with online communities or truly online interaction with customers.  We had a small support community. We had played around with live chat as a customer service tool. And we did a few other things in the area of community.

Even though we are located in Silicon Valleyand sit across the street from one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, Google, barely any employees were really active on the community besides shopping at Amazon.

It took some work to find internal thought partners — employees who could coach me on selling ‘Community’ to management. Paul, who headed up the QuickBooks Online product and was probably one of the only other bloggers in the company besides me, provided the guidance I needed.  (There were a few other bloggers, but they were really hard to identify).

So, I started doing Google searches on ‘online communities’ and quickly realized most of the articles were written by researchers and analysts who never built online communities. And as they say ‘it is different when you actually do the work.’ I shouldn’t be so negative because there were some really strong existing communities, such as eBay’s, UrbanBaby, Edmunds, etc.  And we did learn a lot by participating in these communities. We learned. And we shared those learnings with others in the company.  One of the keys to selling to senior management is to make sure nobody at the (grown up) table is surprised by what you show them. In other words, the plan was to make sure that almost of Bennett’s direct reports knew what we were going to share with them before the big presentation.

Secondly, it was important to partner with key internal groups, such as legal, privacy, and finance. Leveraging my working relationship with Paul (he had helped with a number of projects before), we sat down with the General Council and presented our case for why developing an online community would be a game changer. Ironically, we already had an online community up and running, so we had first hand evidence that the company would not fall apart. I  recommend that you not start a community before receiving legal’s approval.

Since part of the plan was to encourage employees to participate in the community, legal was concerned about how we planned to monitor what was said online. That’s when we came up with the idea to provide opt-in training to employees in the company.   In forming my partnerships, I developed some key slogans to reinforce my commitment to get them involved. These included: – Legal is not evil (we even wanted to printed t-shirts with this motto)– Finance can be your friend – Privacy and Security are not trying to restrict you – Product and Customer Service can work together

It was important to get finance on board because it was clear that we would be an expense to the company and any cost savings would have to be identified and (financially) modeled over time. For example, we knew we would eventually try and demonstrate that our users would eventually start going to the community vs. picking up the phone and calling our 800 number. 

Finance also had to be involved because of potential revenue recognition issues. The definition of revenue recognition basically states that if a company discusses (and this includes using the word ‘expects’) a particular feature that is not already in the product, they will have to account for any potential revenue generated by sharing  information on a particular product/service during that period.  For more info on revenue recognition: http://www.sec.gov/interps/account/sab101.htm

Key Play Takeaway: Legal is not evil.