QuickBooks – The Morphing of Community With Product
by Anita Campbell
Product forums and discussion boards are as old as the hills (well, maybe not THAT old, but almost as old as the Web, dating back to 1996). Most companies use discussion forums as part of a multi-layered strategy for providing customer support — along with email/chat/phone support; online technical specs and help files; and a searchable knowledgebase.
But one thing that is unusual is to find a product that pulls in discussion threads from the community right into the product itself.
Intuit instituted this new feature in its 2009 QuickBooks application. I’ve been reviewing QuickBooks 2009 and find it interesting to see how they’ve brought the community and the product together.
When you are in the Quickbooks application, to the right side of the screen is a small vertical box labeled “Live Community”:
There’s a question box right there, where you can ask a question without having to leave QuickBooks and navigate to the Community discussion boards. The answers will pop up right on your screen so you can scroll through them. In essence, you can bring the Community into the product and to you, instead of the other way around.
This is for the desktop version of QuickBooks 2009, that I’m talking about (not the online version). But of course you have to be connected to the Internet when using Quickbooks, to use the Live Community feature.
Thought...
