Your Great Intuit Help Contacts
Great Intuit Help Contacts
Here are some Great Intuit Help Contacts. They came from working with many top Intuit people on QuickBooks, TurboTax, ProSeries (TurboTax professional) and Quicken. I also gave about 10,000 forum answers in the early days of QuickBooks. This all led to:
- Repeated fast email exchanges with many Intuit top executives.
- Having discussions and lunches with them.
- Becoming the only winner of two pre-release QuickBooks Top Tester prizes (my results discouraged other testers, so I stopped Intuit from giving prizes).
- Three Intuit Customer Advisory Councils; many Ask the Expert panels.
- First non-Intuit employee editing the Intuit QuickBooks website blog.
- Having Intuit arrange magazine stories featuring me (more on this later).
Great Intuit Help Contacts – Intuit Founder Scott Cook
Intuit emails are often FirstName-LastName@Intuit.com. Therefore, the Great Intuit Help Contacts for Intuit founder Scott Cook is Scott-Cook@Intuit.com. The initial story of Scott and Intuit is in the excellent Inside Intuit book (only $2.99 used from Amazon). You also can borrow my very well worn copy if near my Live Oak (Florida) home, or if we meet at QuickBooks Connect.
Great Intuit Help Contacts – Intuit Chairman Brad Smith
My Great Intuit Help Contacts include Intuit Chairman Brad Smith (former Intuit CEO). Brad-Smith@Intuit.com/. His first email to me was:
From: “Smith, Brad D.” <Brad_Smith2@intuit.com> (he soon dropped the 2) To: <mblock@blocktax.com>
Cc: “Walker, Rich” <Rich_Walker@intuit.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2003 11:38 AM
Subject: Introduction
Mike:
I am sorry that we were unsuccessful in connecting live on Tuesday. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Brad Smith, and I have recently joined Intuit working with Rich Walker and other key impact players across Intuit to strengthen our advocacy and commitment to the accounting profession and its many professionals. I am reaching out to you by way of this e-mail in hopes that we can schedule a 30-minute call to make introductions and briefly discuss ideas and key areas of focus. I understand that this is the busiest time of year, but have also been told by many Intuit executives such as Rich, Tom Allanson and others that you have been quite open to taking the time to assist Intuit, are a tremendous voice of reason and are one of our most impactful and innovative Professional Advisors.
Please let me know if there would be a convenient time next week to conduct this call. Thank you in advance for your consideration, and for what I hope will continue to be a long and productive business partnership.
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The Amazing Brad Smith:
Brad (Brad_Smith@Intuit.com) first asked what was the one thing Intuit could do for me. With no prior thought, I specifically asked for a site for feature requests, with user voting. He soon called back. This time two top Intuit people listened, at his request. He spoke of a top management meeting. Intuit founder Scott Cook now wanted a site to track those who first asked for feature requests that Intuit later adopted (“even if it took two years”), The idea was for Scott to recognize them. We soon got an Accountant Inner Circle website, which is now part of the main QuickBooks site. However, it lacks voting and recognition. More also on this soon.
I exchanged many fast emails with Brad. even on Sunday. He apologized when a trip to India delayed him. Many mentioned solutions to the long Intuit seasonal phone support hold times. They came up at my first Council meeting. I kept after Brad and many of other great Intuit help and QuickBooks help contacts over this. One of my ideas was tech-support-backed, user-to user-forums, linked to the programs. Brad began with them when he ran the TurboTax division. They let him deliver better support answers in less time. They also saved Intuit staff time. When Brad began running the QuickBooks division, he got these forums. This won Intuit an international prize and let it reassign a full one-seventh of total employees. Based on that, I told Brad he would soon be Intuit CEO. He was, in just over two years. He later wrote, “You’re fantastic Mike. Absolutely fantastic!
Please try not to email Scott Cook or Brad Smith about most QuickBooks problems. Contacts for that will come in later Great QuickBooks Help Contacts posts.
Former Intuit CEO Steve Bennett:
Brad later said former Intuit CEO Steve Bennet TOLD him to email me before coming to Intuit. While on Steve’s QuickBooks ProAdvisor Advisory Council, I opposed increased payroll tax table fees on each company. Some of my posts explained that my opposition partly related to wanting Intuit healthy and growing. It was not then very profitable. This was surprising, as it had around 80% of the market with three products (QuickBooks, TurboTax, Quicken). My posts also explained that I wanted Intuit healthy and growing, so users and professional accountants could get many more upgrades and build better businesses. Despite these explanations, I felt Steve might drop me from the Council. Instead, he wrote, “Keep raising hell when Intuit does something wrong!”
Steve is not on my list for Great Intuit Help Contacts because he is no longer at Intuit. He ran Symantec for two years after leaving Intuit.