Musings of a Marketing Maven

For years I’ve loved Quick­Books – a tool that made man­ag­ing my company’s money remark­ably pleas­ant. I used to rave about it to col­leagues. But over the past sev­eral prod­uct releases I’ve become dis­en­chanted; I think Intuit has lost its way, and has lost sight of whose inter­est it was pursuing.

With its most recent release, Quick­Books Pro 2010, Intuit has con­vinced me they’ve decided to walk away from their ori­gins as a customer-focused soft­ware provider. They used to be a shin­ing exam­ple of cus­tomer cen­tric­ity, and now they strike me as hav­ing adopted the per­sona of a me-centered teenager.

Bloat­ware?

Quick­Books in the early days was a great exam­ple of func­tion dri­ves form: like an entry-level BMW, it did what it was designed to do really well, with­out a lot of frills. And like a 3-series Beamer, it used to offer good han­dling and very nice performance.

Nowa­days (much like cur­rent 3-series BMWs) Quick­Books feels slug­gish, bloated – per­haps designed by com­mit­tee or prod­uct man­agers overly incented by up-sell rev­enues. (More on that shortly.) The UI has got­ten encrusted with fea­tures, and the snappy per­for­mance dis­ap­peared years ago.

For Whose Benefit?

I was peeved at hav­ing to buy the 2010 ver­sion, just to run my account­ing sys­tem on an upgraded PC with Win­dows 7. From my research the fea­ture delta between 2008 and 2010 not worth the upgrade price, at least for my busi­ness. But this was clearly a case of planned obso­les­cence, to drive their rev­enue engine, so I ordered the upgrade.

Start­ing from the per­spec­tive of a reluc­tant upgrader, now I’m really  annoyed — by the mul­ti­ple ways in which Intuit sig­nals that it no longer cares to invest in processes that learn from cus­tomer inter­ac­tions. As a result they waste my time on processes that ben­e­fit them, but not my business.

Since my upgrade a few days ago, I’ve found Quick­Books and the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence deliv­ered by Intuit to be on a down­ward glide path from their pre­vi­ous qual­ity stan­dards. It took sev­eral attempts to install with­out crash­ing on my high-end Vista PC. The installer’s UI was unread­able at times, so it was not clear when or what to click. After an hour of gnash­ing my teeth, I finally man­aged to get the soft­ware installed properly.

What’s Wrong with Their CRM?

And then there’s the fairly lengthy reg­is­tra­tion process. I’ve been a cus­tomer for more than a decade, but they still ask the same ques­tions every time I reg­is­ter online – despite the fact they’ve clearly saved my pro­file in a CRM record some­where (based on com­ments from their rep).

Before you can com­plete the reg­is­tra­tion process, of course, there’s the dreaded call to a cus­tomer ser­vice agent to get a “val­i­da­tion code” in order to acti­vate the soft­ware. What with hold times and the ques­tions they have to ask, that process took 2 tries and about 10 min­utes total. (I gave up the first time: on hold for 4+ min­utes with no feed­back from their phone sys­tem as to whether my call had been dis­con­nected, or was in a queue.)

Annoy­ingly, the rep asked sev­eral ques­tions that I’d pre­vi­ously answered moments before via the reg­is­tra­tion form. His sys­tem was slow so it took him almost 5 min­utes to sup­ply the val­i­da­tion code to acti­vate the soft­ware. (He was quite embar­rassed at our mutual wait.)

To his cha­grin and my dis­may, QuickBook’s UI on my PC did not work as expected, so we were unable to ver­ify that the acti­va­tion code was actu­ally installed prop­erly. (So far, so good, but I may dis­cover next week that I have to repeat the val­i­da­tion inter­ac­tion with a CSR.)

I find myself won­der­ing, why can’t they just com­plete the acti­va­tion process elec­tron­i­cally, the way every­one else does? There’s no value to the cus­tomer in the phone-based process – it sim­ply exposes us to more unwanted ser­vice pitches. It’s not a con­struc­tive use of our time, although I under­stand why Intuit wants to put us through this.

Is It Bloat­ware – or Ad-Ware?

One of the most annoy­ing things about their recent prod­uct releases is the way they lard the UI with links to online ser­vices they want to pitch you. There’s no obvi­ous cue in the UI (by design, no doubt) to tell you which of the icons on your dis­play rep­re­sent fea­tures already installed, and which are sim­ply “up-sell links.” I can tell it’s going to take a while to learn which icons or screen real estate to avoid…

Today I was forced into an online “wiz­ard inter­ac­tion” to decline ser­vices I’ve declined twice already this week (via the reg­is­tra­tion process and the rep). What is wrong with these guys?

I already hated the fact that my prior 2008 ver­sion would repeat­edly try to up-sell me fea­tures I’d pre­vi­ously declined – some­times more than once a quar­ter. How many times do I have to say no before they stop ask­ing? It looks like this behav­ior has con­tin­ued into the 2010 version.

Besides what it implies about Intuit’s unbri­dled com­mer­cial­ism, what’s so infu­ri­at­ing about these embed­ded ads is that they inter­rupt the user’s con­cen­tra­tion and work­flow. There’s no way to turn them off. They dis­tract us from our task focus. We’re doing our account­ing because we have to, not because we love spend­ing our time here.

It appears that Intuit has decided to treat the Quick­Books cus­tomer expe­ri­ence as if we had agreed to oper­ate under an “ad-supported” con­tent model. And yet we cus­tomers are pay­ing fairly hefty fees to upgrade.

We’re oper­at­ing under a paid-for con­tent model, so they should stop their “inter­rup­tion adver­tis­ing” behav­ior and let us focus on get­ting our account­ing done, with as few inter­rup­tions or dis­trac­tions as possible.