Intuit’s Salesforce and Slack-Powered Digital HQ Helped Boost Customer Service Ratings by 12% — Here’s How

With 100 million global customers, Intuit, the global technology platform behind products like QuickBooks, MailChimp, TurboTax, and Mint, is focused on using technology to simplify people’s lives and give them confidence in their business decisions.

For the past decade, Intuit has used Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud to help its more than 14,000 employees deliver a unified experience that puts the customer first. By adding the power of Slack, Intuit has made it even easier for team members to collaborate and solve customer problems, saving time and boosting satisfaction – especially during tax season. 

We sat down with Gabrielle Dracopoulos, Intuit’s Head of Customer Success and Experience, to learn how Salesforce and Slack together are helping the company build its digital HQ — the platform teams need to connect everyone across the business and deliver a meaningful customer experience from anywhere. 

Q: What are your priorities as Intuit’s Head of Customer Success and Experience? 

At Intuit, our main goal is to ensure we can provide the support small business owners and operators need to focus on their business, not their books. We want them to realize the value of their investment over the long term.

Day to day, I look after four key functions: human-to-human support via phone and chat; digital self-service experiences; our quality and learning department; and the customer experience organization, which maps the customer journey end to end and helps design our products and interaction experiences.

Q: What’s your vision for a digital HQ?

To me, a digital headquarters means providing employees with the technology they need to innovate, collaborate, and stay connected to do their jobs as effectively as possible.

We are going to be working in a hybrid world. A digital headquarters means centralizing customer data and providing team members with intuitive tools that allow them to be just as productive outside of the office as they are inside — from anywhere in the world. Integrating Salesforce and Slack has been key to accomplishing this — it’s how we store information, build a 360-degree view of the customer, and enable collaboration across our organization.

Q: How is Salesforce helping Intuit deliver on its mission?

For Australia, Mexico, and Brazil, which are still emerging markets for Intuit, amplifying our brand there was the priority. Marketing Cloud has allowed us to store customer information in one place and get campaigns out the door in a consistent and collective fashion. As part of our Signature Success Plan, Proactive Monitoring ensures customers don’t miss important emails from us, especially around tax time, and gives early notice of any issues so we can resolve them quickly without disruption.

Service Cloud has given our agents a unified view of each customer, allowing them to offer relevant guidance and easily reference a knowledge base. And Sales Cloud has helped us capture the sales funnel, from lead gen to acquisition and beyond, allowing sales representatives to become more productive and focus on customer solutions. We also use Tableau to visualize our data and allow everyone, not just data scientists, the opportunity to tell a story with that information. 

In 2019, our U.S. team worked with Salesforce Professional Services on a five-week evaluation across our sales and service teams to create a plan to unify our customer-facing teams through these digital solutions. The output was a streamlined operating model that improved our business processes, eased the rollout of new products, and gave our sales and service teams a unified view of customer data.

Q: What challenges was Intuit looking to address when it began using Slack?

We introduced Slack five years ago as a simple way to communicate through direct messaging. Today, it’s the number-one platform we use for collaboration and information sharing, allowing us to connect seamlessly across regions and departments. Overall, we’ve created 1,200 Slack workflows across the company. 

Personally, I can say that when I wake up in the morning, Slack — not email — is the first app I open. It’s second nature and integrated into everything we do. I send thousands of Slacks a month. I can’t imagine being in a workplace where I don’t have Slack anymore. 

Q: How has Slack improved internal and external collaboration?

We have Slack channels for the whole company, specific teams, and various tasks and activities — from day-to-day collaboration to quickly resolving high priority customer cases. For example, as soon as an urgent incident comes up, teams create a Slack channel to get all relevant people involved to collaborate on priority incidents to resolve cases more efficiently.

We also use Slack Huddles, which are impromptu audio conversations that are designed to recreate the spontaneous and informal discussions from the office. In a contact center, someone walked the floor to help agents in real time. Working from home, we couldn’t do that anymore. With Slack, you can see whether someone is available and instantly start a Huddle, without having to schedule a meeting. It’s not only great for support and collaboration, but also keeps personal interactions alive in the same way as walking past someone’s desk. 

We also use Slack Connect to collaborate with external partners, whether an outsourcing organization or a white label partnership. Creating a Slack channel allows us to instantly ask and answer questions and work together in real time, instead of going back and forth on email.

Q: Tell me a bit about Quincy, your customer service bot.

Quincy is a custom AI bot we built in 2019 to provide agents with the information they need while helping customers in real time. Previously, agents found it difficult to navigate our knowledge base across different applications. 

Quincy allowed agents to type a customer question as they were asking it and surface relevant articles. If that didn’t resolve the issue, an agent could use Quincy to quickly reach next-level experts that guided them in the moment through chat. After integrating Quincy with Slack, the bot went from resolving 10% to 15% of questions to answering 60% of them. We’ve been able to resolve customer cases 36% faster, which translates to 9,000 hours saved annually. Agent confidence has gone up by 20%, and customer satisfaction as measured by Net Promoter Score has increased by 12%. The bot is only proving more valuable as it continues to learn over time. 

Q: What are some other ways Intuit uses Slack?

We’ve used Slack to automate routine tasks. For example, our team has written rules that automatically drop feedback from customers into specific Slack channelsWe also have a feedback hub that lets anyone see the information coming in, have a conversation around it, and take action. If something is not working on a product or process, we can instantly make a change if the solution is simple. If it’s more complex, people can immediately jump into a Huddle. 

Another example: When customers make a booking for assisted onboarding within Quickbooks, it automatically creates a case within Salesforce. Our experts don’t have to input information from a customer; instead, they can do their research and jump right in. 

Slack also helps with internal onboarding. As new team members join, they can access self-paced, guided training in bite-sized chunks through the Quincy bot. 

Overall, Salesforce and Slack are what enable us to provide the level of service and support we’re known for — especially during tax season spikes.

More information:

Read about Salesforce and Slack here.