Experts are crucial to our mission of powering prosperity. They’re our direct connection to customers and important customers in their own right.
How we talk to experts is important. We want to champion experts and earn their trust. If we communicate well and deliver a great work experience for them, we know our customers will benefit, too.
Along with Intuit’s general style principles, use these guidelines to understand our expert audience and to shape conversations with them.
Respect their expertise
Experts know their stuff. Acknowledge their experience and don’t overexplain. Speak to them like the professionals they are.
Enter your customer’s retirement distribution amount to determine their early withdrawal penalty.
Make sure to remember that if your customer makes an early withdrawal from their retirement account, they’ll incur penalties. To figure out your customer’s early withdrawal penalty, enter the amount of their retirement distribution, and the program will calculate it for you.
Use accrual accounting if that works best for the client.
If the client prefers to record revenue or expenses when the sale happens, not when payment is received or made, that’s OK too.
From first-time cleanup to month-end close, the Books review workflows help you efficiently manage your clients’ books.
Always use Books review to manage your clients’ books. Our workflows will help you improve your firm and do a better job for your clients.
Be their supportive partner
We’re in this together. Help experts feel prepared and confident by letting them know we always have their back. Add context where they need it, and take away guesswork by providing clear steps for helping customers.
Enter case notes to wrap up your call. Need a refresher on what to include? Review case note tips.
You must document your case in case notes to preserve client information. Don’t forget to include all pertinent information about the call.
Use Smartlook to review your client’s two-year comparison together. Draw directly on their screen to point out year-over-year differences.
You can show your client what’s happening from year to year using whatever tools you want in IEP.
Your client starts with a 30-day free trial. After that, they need to provide billing info to continue the subscription.
Your clients are your responsibility. Make sure they enter billing info to avoid service disruption after their free trial period.
Say just enough
Experts process a lot of information from various sources to help our customers. Use as many words as you need to be clear, get to the point, and then get out of the way.
Complete these requests as soon as you can, then send them to Quality Review.
Too much: It’s important to complete these requests first because they’re time sensitive and require urgent action. Start these items before you work on anything else. When you’re done, send them over to the Quality Review team to have a look.
Too little: Prioritize these requests.
Respond with empathy when your client asks for help with an excluded tax situation. Close the engagement, provide help resources, and release your client back to prepare the return on their own.
Too much: Certain tax scenarios are excluded from the services TurboTax offers. This situation is one of those excluded tax situations. Let your client know they are on their own and we can not help them. Close out the engagement, but don’t forget to add notes about the service exclusion before you do.
Too little: Your client’s situation is excluded. Make note of the service exclusion and close the engagement.
Based on the info the client provided about their situation, make sure their current product covers their tax complexity. If it doesn’t, let the client know which product they need, as well as the cost difference. With their permission, change their product.
Too little: Check the client’s SKU and change their product if you have to.
Speak to a higher purpose
Emphasize experts’ roles in our collective success by zooming out from day-to-day work and drawing attention to larger goals and principles. Just be choosy about when and where to bring up the big picture. If we’re slowing down their work, it’s not the right time.
Prioritizing what’s best for every customer means talking to clients about upcoming feature changes now, so we can reduce potential anxiety and frustration in the future.
Tell clients they should expect to see a number of changes in the product.
Let’s do great things together.
Keep going on your task list.
That’s all for today. Thanks for helping our customers through their highs and lows!
You completed a task. Before you start your next task, take a minute to pat yourself on the back.
Illustrate their impact
For experts, helping people and providing great service are key motivators. Connect the dots between their work and customer wins, using data where it makes sense.
You’ve helped 100 clients achieve their financial goals.
You’ve closed 100 engagements. Let’s go for 200!
You connected this client with an expert. Great work!
You transferred this client. You can return to the engagement list now.
More on experts
Expert roles and needs vary, and you’ll need to understand some nuances of the expert community to hit the right style and tone for your situation.
Roles matter
Our experts include credentialed tax and bookkeeping professionals like certified public accountants (CPAs), enrolled agents (EAs), tax attorneys, and ProAdvisors. Other experts serve as frontline customer support agents, helping with product navigation, product bugs, and information gathering.
When deciding on what language to use in expert communication, consider the responsibilities and experience of your specific audience. With a seasoned tax or accounting expert, we speak their language and use subject matter terminology. Terms like “asset depreciation” and “tax offset” are commonplace for them. On the other hand, someone onboarding in customer support might benefit from additional context.
Relationships matter
Many experts are employed or contracted by Intuit to provide tax and accounting services. When writing for these experts, we can be prescriptive about which words to use and which processes to follow.
Other experts aren’t employed by Intuit but are still an essential part of the expert community. These independent accounting experts run their own practices, using products like QuickBooks Online Accountant and ProConnect to serve their customers. When writing for them, we position our products as a trusted tool in their toolkit, emphasizing that we’re a partner in their success.
Context matters
While we’re always respectful of their expertise, sometimes experts aren’t the only ones in the audience. Expert-facing content often shapes the words experts use when speaking to customers. In some scenarios, like in scripts for onboarding, our specific goal is to help experts talk to customers. In these cases, be aware of how messaging to experts will surface to customers. Avoid internal acronyms and jargon. Go for clarity.
