Shifting the valleys of demand and supply during peak tax season on Turbotax
Estimated 8 min read
Context
How did I add value?
As a Systems Design Engineering student, I've always adopted a systems thinking mindset and found that my coursework in addition to past experience in UXR helped me thrive on Intuit's Service Design Team.
Working at a larger org, we also had the chance to work with XFN like PMM, tax experts, and engineering.(This work also shipped within weeks of handing off designs ✨)
Background
What's the challenge?
The high demand at the tax deadline for TurboTax Full Service requires a peak experience revamp for our customers and tax experts in order to increase customer satisfaction and retention.
So, why is this problem worth solving?
Demand at the tax deadline peak for TurboTax Full Service in Canada has emphasized the importance of delivering the best possible experience for our customers and tax experts throughout the tax season.
Peak is defined as the period of time (April 15 - May 02 2022) where the spike in demand exceeds Tax Assistant/Expert availability, putting in jeopardy a customer’s ability to file on time.
Defining the problem
What's the current state?
Understanding prehistoric data
Taking a look at prehistoric SurveyMonkey data from the previous tax year, we noticed that users were displaying frustration as they got closer to the tax deadline.
As a designer, it's also important to understand the drawbacks of leveraging surveys as a main research method. While the total number of responses was 218, the majority of responses were collected during the peak tax period from April 5 2021 to May 3 2021. This further supports the assumption that survey results can be extremely polarizing and may not accurately represent user sentiment.
Follow-Me-Home Insights
What are follow-me-homes?
At Intuit, we conducted research through the form of what we called: Follow-Me-Homes. We follow the tax experts and assistants home to learn more about their experience with Intuit's tools and working with our customers.
Research goals
Learn what we can do in tools, processes, and training to improve the tax preparation experience and communication with customers.
Gauge overall Internal Expert Portal (IEP) user experience and identify UX issues.
Expert pain points
Lack of communication: 40% of participants expressed a lack of communication - results in varying understandings of the customer’s tax situation.
Pre-payment improves desire to complete: When users pay in advance, they're more likely to complete their taxes with Turbotax due to sunk cost.
Changes to product offerings are inconvenient: Customers that change their product offering have a poor refund/change experience and the engagement will be closed.
Who are the key players?
Tax expert
Tax Experts "work virtually with TurboTax customers to help them with their taxes, answer their questions, and review their tax returns before filing.”
Tax prep assistant (TPA)
Tax Prep Assistants act as an intermediary between customers and Tax Experts. They gather preliminary information from the customer, help the customer choose their product offering, and send information to Tax Experts.
Customer
Customers include the general public who will be filing their taxes with varying tax situations. This user base has no defining qualities.
Permutations of tax/expert availability
Research methods & data analysis
What are the project goals?
Quantitative goals
Reduce the change in NPS from -18 pts in TY20 (2021) to -5 pts in TY21 (2022).
Qualitative goals
Inform customers about the high demand
Better set user expectations
Provide appropriate alternatives to customers
Competitive Analysis
Outside-in research
I began by conducting outside-in research, with other companies that had tackled the peak experience problem in the past. Companies like Amazon deal with peak during the holiday season, when customers make purchases on December 24 in hopes of a Christmas miracle or companies like AirCanada experience peak demand when all families plan their travels around the singular week every student is out of school.
Key Takeaways
Inform and education customers about services
Managing expert capacity and workload
Advertising through various channels
Differential pricing based on customer and time segmentation
Outside-in research
This is all to say - managing the peaks and valleys of demand isn't a new problem.
Go wide, then narrow
Developing a structured process
Double Diamond Design
Intuit follows the double-diamond design process which is based on a divergence-convergence design model.
Solving the right problem
Workshop 1: Problem Defintion
With this first workshop, we brought together XFN from design, product marketing, and service delivery to identify and prioritize problems collaboratively as well as align cross-functional stakeholders on the problem space. This created a holistic research environment and opportunity for discussion.
Our goal was a prioritized list of HMW (how might we ...) problem statements to kickstart future ideation and act as a set of guiding principles in the design phase.
Workshop 1 insights
So, how might we ….
1. Set timing expectations upfront during onboarding (FUE)?
a. Explain the what, how, and why
2. Better communicate with customers during info gathering?
a. The impact of not providing info on time
b. The progress and timeline updates
c. Flag risks while keeping the customer comfortable
Solving the problem right
Workshop 2: Initial Ideation
For the 2nd workshop we began ideation in a smaller group between PM and design. Our goal was to develop a list of solutions and prioritize these collaboratively based on business and UX impact.
Workshop 2 output - Various ideas
10 major solutions were identified and prioritized based on customer impact, business impact, and feasibility. 5 of these solutions will be implemented in TY21.
Design Decisions
Design Decision 1
Steps laid out clearly on launch
Provides a step by step on the process and expected timelines, allowing users to know what to anticipate.
Design Decision 2
Clear deadlines and alternatives
Users are made aware of the tax deadline and timeline expectations through the use of a banner above the CTA, and are prompted to see other TurboTax products, promoting transparency and funneling users to other alternatives.
Design Decision 3
Leveraging colour to indicate urgency
As the tax deadline approaches, the same banner from the first page changes colour to act as a warning and links out to a modal providing more detail on what this means for the customer.
Learnings & next steps
What are next steps?
Data collection
Integrating passive insights tools to track the user interactions/behaviour in product.
For example:
1. How many users click the link in the modal?
2. Do users view other TurboTax products before continuing down Full Services despite potential delays?
Post-experiment user interviews
Conduct user interviews with Experts as a retro on their TY21 experience to understand the impacts of the suggested initiatives and how to support future iterations.
Historical comparisons
Compare survey results from TY21 to TY20 to track the impact of efforts to customers during peak.
