Christine Morrison, Intuit, and other panelists presented a case study on an exciting topic, taxes. All joking aside, the topic is something we can all relate to at this time of year.

Christine serves as the product manager for TurboTax and makes sure the entire customer experience and product lives up to the expectations of customers. To get things started you need to listen to your customers. Customers are you best teachers.

Most importantly though, you need to act on what you hear from your customers. That's what separates listening from engagement.

So what does WOM have to do with taxes? Believe it or not there are passionate users of TurboTax. Intuit built the Inner Circle as a community for their passionate users. They wanted to solicit their input and then give something back. One of the difficult things it keeping the balance between what we give and what we get. The majority of the members are mostly looking for recognition.

In the product development cycle TurboTax has to be on time. Uncle Sam doesn't push back his tax deadline, so they can't push back the updates to TurboTax.

They currently have 10,000 members out of a customer base of 15 million. This small little sandbox gives Christine and Intuit a great place to test new things. One thing they have been doing are local events for their members. On the internal blog, users have begun to stick up for Intuit, they are becoming brand advocates.

A huge issue for Intuit is the listing of their software on sites like Amazon and the accompanying product reviews. This past year Christine invited their beta users to leave reviews on Amazon. Reviewers were required to disclose that they had received a preview edition of TurboTax.

Intuit works with Informative to collect data about their customers and Inner Circle members. Intuit uses this data to understand what's important to their customers. Content that is discussed is also ranked by the members. The goal is to have scalable conversations with customers.

Promoters want to have an ongoing dialogue with brands while detractors want action to be taken on their issues. This allows Intuit to provide different content to promoters and detractors.

One of the major benefits is that Intuit can allocate resources to fix the issues that matter most to their promoters/detractors.

Building great products builds great WOM. Their research shows that 46% of new customers arrive because of WOM. Rather than mining for customers they think of it as mining for gold. The Inner Circle was mostly a product development program. The decision was made to use the Inner Circle for more outreach programs.

While many organizations use the net-promoter score as an indicator, how many of them actually follow-up on this? What this means is if the person was likely recommend our product, did they actually do it? Intuit learned that 14% of their Inner Circle members were true advocates.