Microsoft Customer Solution
Customer Solution Case Study
Financial Services Firm Uses Online Agent to
Improve Customer Service, Trim Costs
Overview ―We recognized that the value of PAC would be in its
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Professional services ability to understand the questions that customers
were asking and to respond in a language that was
Customer Profile
Intuit Inc., of Mountain View, California,
equally easy to understand.‖
provides financial software and services for Ellen Hongo, Collaborative Knowledge Solutions Team Leader, Intuit
consumers and small businesses. Intuit
has 8,000 employees worldwide and
revenues of U.S.$2.67 billion.
Intuit Payroll Services helps small businesses navigate the complex
Business Situation area of payroll, which is governed by a maze of inscrutable laws.
The Intuit Payroll Services group needed to
provide better online support for a rapidly Intuit wanted to provide customers with better support and also
growing small-business customer base that stem the rising tide of support calls, which were increasing as its
needed assistance in navigating complex
payroll issues. payroll business grew. Intuit used the Microsoft® Automated Service
Agent solution to create the Payroll Answer Center (PAC), an online
Solution
Intuit used the Microsoft® Automated interactive service tool that allows customers to ask questions in
Service Agent solution to create an online, their own words and get rapid responses. PAC has averaged
interactive service tool called Payroll
Answer Center that lets customers ask 20,000 sessions a month, or 80,000 questions, with a 70 percent
questions in their own words. successful resolution rate. Intuit has discovered that PAC is also a
Benefits great sales-lead generation tool, providing an automated way to
Improved customer service respond to customer questions about additional payroll services.
Reduced costs, better staff utilization
Up-sell opportunities
Intuit is also using PAC to gain customer insights to improve its
Improved products payroll product and services.
Situation under control and make support offerings a
Intuit set out in 1983 to simplify a common real competitive differentiator.
household dilemma: balancing the family
checkbook. Its Quicken personal finance Solution
software became wildly popular, and the The Payroll Services group learned about the
company‘s flagship products—Quicken®, Microsoft® Automated Service Agent (ASA)
QuickBooks®, and TurboTax® software—are solution from the Intuit TurboTax group, which
today used by millions of small businesses had implemented the online service agent to
and households worldwide. The Mountain provide easier online customer support
View, California–based company has an during the frantic tax season. Microsoft
expanding portfolio of financial software and Automated Service Agent is a virtual support
services, and boasts annual revenues of representative that lives online and provides
U.S.$2.67 billion. customer support around the clock,
interacting in a natural, conversational style.
Payroll services are one of the company‘s Customers use a text-chat interface to type
fastest growing expansion areas. Initially a questions in their own words and receive
module in QuickBooks, Intuit Payroll Services immediate responses. ASA uses a natural-
is now also available as a standalone language–based lexicon and back-end
packaged product and online payroll service knowledge base to provide answers.
called Intuit Online Payroll. Intuit Payroll
Services is one of Intuit‘s key engines for ―ASA became a way for us to impact the
growth. customer experience in a very short period of
time,‖ Hongo says. ―We had plans to revamp
However, Intuit has found that growing a our support Web site, but we used ASA to
service-based business requires attentive leapfrog this involved effort to rapidly deploy
and readily-available customer support, a self-service environment for our
especially in an area like payroll that is bound customers.‖
by complex, ever-changing government
regulations. ―Our customer is a small Payroll Answer Center
business owner who never wanted to become Intuit Payroll Services used ASA to create the
a payroll specialist,‖ says Ellen Hongo, Payroll Answer Center (PAC), an online
Collaborative Knowledge Solutions Team natural-language service tool that allows
Leader at Intuit. ―He wants to focus on his customers to ask questions about payroll
business but has to run payroll every two services and get fast, friendly answers. Like a
weeks. There‘s a huge set of knowledge that live agent, PAC uses information it learns
he needs to have for this process and, from customers to provide increasingly
although it‘s very repetitive, our customers do relevant answers with successive customer
it infrequently enough that they don‘t questions.
remember all the steps.‖
Intuit has integrated PAC with its
Consequently, Intuit Payroll Services received eSubmission online call-back tool to allow
upwards of 90,000 support calls each month. customers to escalate a PAC session to a live-
The only online resource the company offered agent call if PAC is not able to answer their
was a list of frequently-asked questions, questions. A transcript of the customer‘s PAC
which many customers ignored. With its session is immediately available to customer
payroll business growing rapidly, Intuit support agents so they can more quickly
needed to do something to get support costs solve the customer‘s problem.
―Increased utilization of
―Customers are asking Rapid Setup ―Customers are asking an average of four
PAC will drive a
an average of six The Payroll staff took lessons from the questions per session. Our analysis of the
questions decrease in
continuing per session … TurboTax team and knew that it couldn‘t transcripts shows that customers may start
call volume.‖
once the [initial]
simply take existing Web content and publish
it in PAC. ―We knew that we needed to create
the session focused on one issue, but once
the question has been answered, they
question has been
Ellen Hongo, Collaborative Knowledge Solutions
Team Leader, Intuit
new content and we needed to speak the
language of our customers and not
continue to ask questions on additional
topics,‖ Hongo says.
answered, they continue accountant-speak.‖
to ask questions on Mostly, the company turned to the people on
Using upcoming advancements in ASA
technology, Intuit will soon build decision
additional topics.‖ its support front lines—call-center agents—for trees so that PAC will be able to lead
help in populating the PAC knowledge base. customers through a series of questions to
―We subscribe to the ‗wisdom of the crowds‘ deliver even more focused and specific
Ellen Hongo, Collaborative Knowledge
approach,‖ Hongo says. ―Content writers are answers.
Solutions Team Leader, Intuit
often removed from customer contact, so
they aren‘t always the best point of Benefits
knowledge collection.‖ Since launching the Payroll Answer Center,
the online agent has handled an average of
Intuit held a contest for call-center agents to 20,000 sessions per month. Intuit has been
find out the top questions that customers able to extend high-quality, personal support
were asking. Within six weeks, 4,000 while trimming call-center hours. Call-center
questions had poured in. Payroll Services agents have more time to handle complex
organized the questions into topical areas issues and create additional PAC content.
and aligned its simplified knowledge-based Intuit also has discovered that customers are
support content to the relevant topic areas. using PAC to ask questions about additional
―We recognized that the value of PAC would capabilities, which is transforming the tool
be in its ability to understand the questions into a useful sales-lead generator.
that customers were asking and to respond in
a language that was equally easy to Improved Customer Service
understand,‖ Hongo says. With PAC, Intuit payroll customers have an
online, interactive option for getting
All in all, it took five months to get PAC questions answered quickly in simple terms.
populated with content, tested, and PAC is available around the clock, so
launched—a fraction of the time it would have customers are free to ask questions beyond
taken to execute major changes to its support normal customer support hours. PAC also
Web site. eliminates the need to wait in a phone queue.
Continuous Learning PAC has averaged 20,000 sessions per
While the TurboTax implementation of ASA month with an average of 4 questions per
focused on providing targeted answers to session for a monthly average of 80,000
highly repetitive and non-complex issues, PAC questions answered—with a 70 percent
focuses on building the knowledge base to successful resolution rate. During January
support a broader set of questions and topics (Intuit‘s peak month), PAC hosted over
with the assumption that customers will 50,000 sessions and answered over
return frequently to utilize PAC as a learning, 200,000 questions.
as well as a problem-solving, tool.
Reduced Costs, Better Staff Utilization gaining insight into its customers‘ thinking.
Since implementing PAC in October 2007, ―The conversational patter and questions that
Intuit has been able to readjust support hours come up in chat communities are more
and staffing to support peak needs. ―Prior to representative of the questions that are
PAC, our customer service lines were staffed asked in PAC than the questions that come in
from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., but the first and to call centers,‖ Hongo says. ―PAC is a trusted
last hours were really slow,‖ Hongo says. source that we can use to see what
―With PAC covering those timeslots, we‘ve customers are interested in. It provides a low-
been able to eliminate those two hours of pressure way for us to tell them about new
support and make more agents available at Intuit services that might help them.‖ In this
peak times.‖ sense, ASA becomes not just a cost-reduction
solution but a data-mining tool that Intuit can
Intuit has also reduced incoming service use to improve its products and services.
volumes by 10 percent while increasing
service levels. ―Increased utilization of PAC In fact, Intuit payroll product designers have
will drive a continuing decrease in call already gleaned valuable insights from PAC
volume,‖ Hongo says. that they‘re using to improve the built-in help
system in Intuit Small Business Payroll. Their
Because PAC handles simple repetitive ideal would be for customers to never need to
questions, call-center agents can focus on leave the product—to make a phone call or
responding to more complex questions and visit a Web site—to get the help they need.
converting that learning into new PAC content Ultimately, Intuit might embed ASA into its
that will help more customers. payroll software and services so that
customers have access to the full-fledged
Up-Sell Opportunities ASA knowledge base and intuitive interface
As it examined the PAC transcripts, Intuit from within the software they‘re using.
observed that 10 to 15 percent of people
using the tool were customers looking for Other future plans for PAC include integrating
additional capabilities and non-customers it with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server
shopping for a solution. Intuit Payroll Services 2007 so that Intuit can create a single
is now working with its sales organization to customer-support knowledge base that can
build content that supports the needs of be tagged and used in multiple
shoppers who want to learn more about environments—PAC, call-center, technical
additional Intuit payroll services. support articles, product design database,
and so forth.
―PAC has turned into a great warm-lead
generator, which we never would have Intuit is also interested in using the Microsoft
anticipated,‖ Hongo says. ―If a customer asks Silverlight™ browser plug-in to enhance the
a question such as, ‗What if I had Assisted user navigation experience within PAC. ―We
Payroll?‘ we pass that information directly to are excited about the many possibilities for
Payroll Telesales. Intuit is considering integrating PAC across our customer support
integrating PAC with a live-chat capability so and product design areas,‖ Hongo says. ―It‘s
that a hot lead could automatically hand off presented completely new ways for us to get
to a live agent. close to our customers.‖
Improved Products through Better Insight
Intuit has found that the information gleaned
from PAC transcripts is extremely valuable in
For More Information Microsoft Automated Service Agent
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products and services, call the Microsoft system represents the next generation of
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the United States or (905) 568-9641 in type session, asking questions in their own
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Canada, please contact your local pages of search results. Available around the
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using the World Wide Web, go to: number of customers at once and respond
www.microsoft.com immediately and accurately. ASA adds value
at every level, not only by significantly
For more information about Intuit products enhancing the customer experience, but also
and services, call (650) 944-6000 or visit by acting as a valuable tool in training,
the Web site at: information dissemination, and cross-selling
www.intuit.com applications enterprise-wide.
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Document published July 2008