The company also tests its programs relentlessly. And not just the so-called alpha and beta testing commonly practiced by most software companies -- tests that are designed primarily to locate bugs in the programming -- but tests at a much earlier stage of product development. Get in some experienced Quicken users -- see if this new version is going to confuse them in any way. Get in some Junior League-style novices. What's their reaction to a certain screen? "You watch their eyebrows, where they hesitate, where they have a quizzical look," says Cook. "Every glitch, every momentary hesitation is our fault."
Enough, you might think. That'll do it, you might think. Not that all the research costs so much -- only the big sample surveys represent much of a cash outlay, in the neighborhood of $150,000 a year. But surely Intuit has been finding out all it possibly can about its customers' experiences with the product?
Nope. "There's still a group of people we were missing," says product manager Mari Latterell. "People just setting the program up. In fact, we didn't really know how easy it was to get started with Quicken. When you survey customers, they've been using it for six months or a year and won't remember. When you bring in testers, you have them in an artificial situation. They aren't entering their own data in their own homes."
Which is why Latterell, imbued with Cook's market-research mission, proposed the Follow-Me-Home program, in which Quicken buyers from local stores are asked to let an Intuit representative observe them when they first use Quicken. And why Alex Young, who volunteered to participate, is now watching his new acquaintance unwrap the shrink-wrapped Quicken box.
Today Young will spend five hours with his subject, longer than any of the dozen or so other employees who have so far followed customers home. Sitting behind the customer, he watches and listens. Customer confronts the program's main menu. (Confusion, notes Young: he thinks the word register, meaning the check register, has something to do with the product-registration card.) Customer begins to enter data from his checkbook. (Problem: he tries to enter a balance manually. You can't do that; once the opening balance is entered, the program calculates the balances automatically.) Customer tries to print checks. (He prints more samples than he needs to.) Finally, the day is done, and the customer is happy. As part of the deal, Young is now allowed to offer a little help and advice.
Young and Intuit, for their part, have their payoff: a thick sheaf of notes on the myriad ways that the next incarnation of Quicken, already the most popular program on the market, might be made just a tiny bit easier for first-time users.
"If people don't use the product," observes Tom LeFevre, "they won't tell their friends to use it, either."
* * *
Suna Kneisley, senior customer support specialist, can't quite believe the fax. A customer she has just spoken with wants to know how to put his various records onto Quicken and has just faxed her nine pages' worth of data. It's a Friday; no way she can go through it all today. Oh, well. She calls the customer and leaves a message: she'll take it home with her over the weekend and get back to him Monday. Monday, she has the answers he wants.
Technical-support reps such as Kneisley are Intuit's front-line employees, like waiters in a restaurant or reservation clerks at an airline. There are 40 of them, almost a quarter of the company's 175-person work force. You've just bought a new printer, and you can't get it to work with Quicken? Call tech support. You've damaged a disk and lost some data? Call tech support. The response you get, of course, will define your attitude toward Quicken and Intuit, probably forever.
So ask yourself: How much is it worth to the company when a customer gets a response like Kneisley's -- not only that she'll answer a request going well beyond the ordinary, but that she'll take it home and work on it over the weekend?
Kneisley, 24, has been at Intuit only five months when this particular request comes in. No matter -- she has already absorbed the messages that Cook has somehow built into the very structure of his company: Intuit stands or falls with what happens in tech support. Do whatever you need to do to satisfy the customer. The messages are hammered home in several different ways:
* Thank-you letters from customers are read aloud, circulated throughout the company, and then framed and posted on the wall. Kneisley's colleague Debbie Peak gets a letter because she faxed a customer some printer information, then thought to call the next day to make sure it had arrived safely. Kneisley herself gets one from a woman who damaged four years' worth of data; working at home with a special data-recovery program, Kneisley salvaged it.
* Virtually everyone in the company, from Cook on down, spends a few hours each month working the customer service lines, underscoring by example the importance of what the department does. "I was hired in September," recalls Victor Gee, who started as a rep and is now a supervisor in tech support. "That same month Scott came by and started taking calls, too. I thought, What other company would have the president do the same thing I'm doing?" Every few months, moreover, each employee is taken to lunch by a top manager. Lunch with a Dork, employees have christened the program -- but its message is not lost. "My last one was with Scott," says customer support specialist Dwight Joseph. "He had his notebook with him, and he writes down what you say, any ideas you might have. It's pretty gratifying."
