Funny that Monson should conjure up that image. When I return from my visit to Intuit, I call up the manager of the local Egghead Discount Software store and ask him about the product. "People love it," he says. "Someone actually came in here and thanked me for selling it to him. That doesn't happen too often."
* * *
By some reckonings, Intuit's approach to customer satisfaction is costly.
Technical support and other departments that have customer contact (the one taking orders for checks, for example) cost the company about 10% of revenues, or upwards of $3 million a year. The testing, surveys, fancy telephone systems, focus groups, and other stay-close-to-the-customer expenses add another $1 million to $2 million. Imagine yourself a corporate raider concerned only with the next quarter's earnings: you'd buy up Intuit, cut back on all such expenditures, and boost profits anywhere from 50% to 100%.
"That," says Scott Cook, "is the advantage of owning the company. When you own the company, you take the long view."
In that long view, the payoff of the Intuit approach is far higher than the immediate cost. Quicken is likely to continue its utter domination of the market. Other products introduced by Intuit will be launched with a running start. Even now, fully one-third of Quicken customers say they bought the product because it was recommended by a friend. As they say in the trade, that's advertising money can't buy.
So is this: As I am working on this article, my friend Bruce stops by. "I hear you're writing about Intuit," he says. "I just bought its program, Quicken."
Bruce doesn't buy much software. A copy of Lotus 1-2-3 given to him by his sister-in-law sits on the shelf unopened. He uses his computer mostly for writing. But he bought Quicken because two different people urged him to. "You've got to get this program," they told him.
Now he has become an apostle himself. The reason: one day, while working on some financial records, he left the room. His two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Emma, waltzed in and cheerfully turned off the computer. In a panic, Bruce turned it back on and booted up Quicken. "Don't worry!" the screen cheerfully informed him. Quicken had saved all but the last little bits of data.
Somewhere, at some point, Scott Cook's engineers had put that capability and its comforting message into the program. Intuit, they knew, was depending on its customers to sell the product.
And customers, they knew, don't really want money-back guarantees or complaint forms or even 800 numbers. What they want is the product to be right.
WAGER: ONE COMPANY
Scott Cook's year of living dangerously
MAY 1, 1985. Almost six years later, Scott Cook still remembers the date. "It was the worst day of my life," he says.
Who would disagree? His company, Intuit, was less than two years old. And he had to tell his seven employees he could no longer pay their salaries.
Cook knew he had a promising product, an easy-to-use check-writing program for personal computers. What he didn't have was money.
The dozens of venture capitalists he had approached scarcely gave him a second glance. The $350,000 he himself had sunk into Intuit, a sum pieced together from life savings and home-equity credit, from credit cards and loans from his father, was nearly gone. Without money, he had no distribution channels and no customers. What computer store would carry an unknown software product -- unsupported by advertising?
Intuit's sales so far had been a kind of good-news-bad-news joke. The good news: Cook had persuaded a few banks to sell the program in their lobbies. Each one ordered several hundred copies for inventory when it signed up, generating a little cash. The bad news: banks were lousy at selling software, so reorders were slim. Knowing he had to get the program into computer stores, he scrambled to sell to just a few more banks.
By the summer of 1986 Cook's efforts had just barely paid off. The little company had $125,000, enough to start an ad campaign. By rights he and his colleagues should have done some tests. But there was no time, not if they wanted to catch the Christmas selling season. So early in the fall they took the $125,000 -- all of it -- and spent it on one make-or-break ad campaign. Cook wrote the ad himself. If it didn't work . . . nah, better not to think too hard about that.
Well, Lady Luck was smiling that fall. Or maybe Cook's extraordinary efforts to create a product that would truly satisfy its buyers were on the money. Whatever the reason, the ad launched Intuit's program on what turned out to be a brilliant career.
"The company," says Cook, now president of a $33-million business, "grew a bunch."
