Vendor Community Building

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• January-March 2006 Issue
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From the January 2006 Tax Season Survival Guide

The professional service trades have a long history of relationship networking and have often utilized the power of community to get new clients, to meet more prospects and to generally market their services, but there is more to be accomplished. In today’s fast-paced world of technology and regulation change, leveraging resources to stay current and to solve problems as quickly as possible is a huge positive for the customer and for the vendor.

“You can get a more in-depth response and sometimes a quicker answer by posting to a virtual forum that is specific to a software product,” says Barry Picker CPA/PFS, CFP, a Partner at Picker & Weinberg, CPAs, P.C and an active participant of the Lacerte User’s Group Virtual forum (LTUG). The virtual forums can give you more perspective and more depth because of the many voices. What is fascinating, however, is that more vendors and more practitioners have not mastered (to the highest level possible) community resources for their firms and customers.

Consider that even the biggest vendors in the world often struggle with how to master the balance of what they offer. “The best information does not come from the top down, but rather horizontally from peers and colleagues. Firms should empower ‘community communication,’ as ideas and knowledge can come from many sources,” says Susan Bradley, CPA.CITP, MCP, GSEC, a Principal of Tamiyasu, Smith, Horn and Braun.

One user points out an issue with forums in her quote about the noise level within any particular group. “When it comes to participating in the virtual communities, I find that the forums have to offer continued value and not get sidetracked with a lot of venting and complaining. My time is extremely valuable, and when I need answers with regards to a specific product, I find that technical support is usually the best path for the firm,” says Teri Abbott, Network Administrator at Stambaugh Ness, PC. The noise level of a virtual forum can be controlled by the moderator and policy statements. The noise level of a user group meeting or seminar is usually controlled by the speakers, but too much control can also be a problem. Too much control hampers the debate and the free flow of knowledge sharing. Let’s take a look at how a few of the vendors serving the accounting and consulting firm niche approach community.

Intuit, a large well-known vendor, often struggles with training its customers to utilize the available resources. However, Intuit seems to have mastered many of the customer service issues on the client level with its QuickBooks product that seem to escape other large vendors. When it comes to a best practice model for customer service, Intuit’s QuickBooks product is to the large software vendor niche as Southwest Airlines is to the airline industry.

The people at Intuit “get it” and “have it” when it comes to end-user client resources. They have figured out a successful model that works even with some complaints. However, when it comes to supporting the products that its advisors depend on such as Lacerte and ProSeries, Intuit falls right back down to the same level as most of its competitors. The vendor utilizes a strong usability lab, focus groups and a customer e-newsletter for QuickBooks, and these resources always include customer quotes and real stories. But the technologies don’t necessarily apply to their accountant-specific products.

Intuit does have a virtual community for Lacerte users at LTUG@yahoogroups.com, but this community was set up independently on Yahoo! Groups. As well, CCH’s ProSystem fx customers have the ProFX group at Profx@yahoogroups.com. These independent communities were created by customers for customers. Despite the independence of these groups, both vendors stay involved and keep an ear in the community buzz in case they can help, but they have yet to apply all the resources they could.