Scott Wilder – Forums at Intuit

I recently interviewed Scott Wilder of Intuit about Intuit’s forums for my presentation on blogs, buzz and forums at the Business Blog Summit in San Francisco. Intuit is a very customer focused company as described by Paul Rosenfield of Intuit. Understanding the benefits of forums, Intuit recently updated their site by redesigning their forums for optimization within search engines and also by providing extra customer support for comment moderation.

Scott explained to me that typically Intuit leaves the process of answering customer questions up to other Intuit customers, in that way, customers provide a greater level of support that Intuit would not be possible with Intuit’s customer support team. If no customer answers a forum question, moderators step in to answer a customer’s question. Also the moderators have helped to cut down on Spam comments. Only 10% of forum users post, most merely read posts. Since updating the Intuit forums the number of registrants has increased four-fold, and has doubled between June & July of 2005.

Intuit measures levels of customer loyalty for each division; the quickbooks group has shown increased levels of retention. While moderators have worked with those customers who post on a regular basis to improve their forum over time.

Posted by johncass at September 23, 2005 1:49 PM