Tax time comes but once a year and for accountants and tax software makers like Intuit’s TurboTax, it’s make or break time. That’s why this past tax season, Turbo Tax ramped up its social media efforts on Twitter to match customer demands of the season.
Besides improving customer relations, it also helps retain customers, according to Chelsea Marti (@TTaxChels on Twitter), TurboTax’ Social Media Manager, who explained the company’s approach at the TWTRCON NY conference.
TurboTax now has more than 20 million customers, but until this year, TurboTax wasn’t able to provide enough resources on Twitter to handle their queries. That changed in February, however, as it increased the number of employees staffing its Twitter feed to 40 from just two last year. Had the feed been staffed only by communications and PR folks, it wouldn’t have succeeded given the complex queries it received. So the company employed tax experts to handle questions and the corporate communications team became the hub that farmed out questions to the appropriate folks to answer customers’ tax questions.
Marti said that at least half of the people who came to the feed were about to finish a return. You can see the entire case study on Econsulstancy’s website.
