How QuickBooks Uses Insights to Make Better Business Decisions

The leading accounting software for small-and medium-sized businesses and the self-employed, Intuit’s Quickbooks helps 5.6 million customers around the world keep the lights on and their employees paid.

But the same thriving market for QuickBooks’ services has given rise to a multitude of competitors. To stay ahead of the curve and maintain its position as an industry leader, Intuit relies on Amplitude’s Product Intelligence platform to create an ever-evolving, best-in-class customer experience.

For QuickBooks, those better decisions have yielded such successes as increased revenue, improved activation rates and CTRs that outpace the industry average.

Humphrey describes Amplitude’s Product Intelligence platform as having a “transformational” effect on QuickBooks.

Amplitude changed all that by putting data insights at employees’ fingertips. For instance, in the QuickBooks payments business, about 90% of their data requests that were once answered manually can now be fulfilled via Amplitude.

The impact has been huge, Humphrey notes, observing: “Our analysts are now able to use the time that they have back in order to build things that are better for our customers.”

For example, the Product team noticed in Amplitude Funnels that its QuickBooks invoicing product was failing to meet its KPI: the number of users paid on time. So, it partnered with the Data team to understand why. They used Amplitude’s Microscope to dig deeper into the number of users who were not converting. With Precision Tracking and Cohorts, they saw that those users and their clients had something in common: Gmail domains.

This was a key user segment for Intuit, so the team created a personalized invoice solution to meet that segment’s needs. The innovation boosted by 2x the number of invoices paid on time with revenue from Gmail invoices.

In Amplitude’s Funnels, the team saw that users were struggling to complete their onboarding flow, a critical milestone in the QuickBooks Self-Employed user lifecycle. The team used Amplitude’s Cohorts to learn why some mobile app users failed to complete the seven-step permission process to unlock the app’s full functionality, including push notifications.

Through their exploratory analysis in Amplitude, the team identified three unnecessary steps to remove and streamline flow. The result? A 25% increase in users who signed up for push notifications.

Thanks to the limitless exploration offered by Amplitude’s Cohorts, Personas, and Engagement Matrix, the product marketing team identified key user segments that were under-using certain product features. Armed with these insights, the team created targeted and personalized campaigns to better address those user segments’ needs. That work paid off when Intuit’s click-through rates soared, with rates peaking at 300% above the industry standard.

Intuit is always looking for ways to boost the number of users it activates, one of its key metrics. A good new user experience (NEUX) sets users up for a better LTV. The team used Amplitude’s Retention and Cohorts to observe their best-performing QuickBooks power users, and followed up with Pathfinder and Engagement Matrix to drill down further to see the actions those top performers take in their first 45 days.

QuickBooks used these findings to reshape their NEUX, adding prompts designed to guide new users through critical milestones, while also making it possible to measure impact in terms of Retention and Funnels. The innovations led to an impressive 10 percent increase in activation.

Amplitude's Digital Analytics Platform is built on AWS and equips customers to aggregate, analyze, and activate user data at scale with integrations across Amazon S3, Redshift, Amazon Appflow, and Amazon Personalize. Amplitude helps organizations deliver better digital experiences so they can thrive and grow. Amplitude's Digital Analytics Platform shows you what your customers love, where they’re getting stuck, and what keeps them coming back.

By asking the right questions, Amplitude helps all teams understand customers across every touchpoint and turn that analysis into action—through session replay, experimentation and personalized campaigns.

With Amplitude, teams don't have to write a single line of code or wait weeks to understand and engage customers so they keep coming back for more. Quickly activate, monetize and retain customers with Amplitude and AWS, and propel your businesses forward today.