Intuit: Making the Best of the Worst

by Kyle David on June 29th at 1:22 pm EST

It seems as though the corporate world is allergic to responsibility. From Toyota, to Goldman Sachs, to BP, we have seen one Fortune 500 CEO after the next deny-deny-deny. For this reason, I have to give a tip of the hat to Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit.

For those small business owners that use Quickbooks Online (a service we use and recommend regularly), you know that for the better part of this week it was offline. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses were paralyzed by having no payroll, no invoicing, and no accounting for the better part of the week. To put it lightly, it was a nightmare come true.

Twitter and other social media started chirping immediately, and by the end of the day on Wednesday it was an absolute free-for-all of speculation, anger, and frustration. For some, the speculation focused around a security breach, others blamed outsourced support, however the company continued to issue a statement through a technical director about a faulty backup system. The lynch mob was in full force.

Using our social media monitoring tool AirCheese.com, we saw negative perceptions of Intuit skyrocket. However, no tool was necessary to feel the intense frustration and rage of the locked out customers. Finally, services were restored to most late in the day on Thursday (at least for us) and a final and rather embarrassing conclusion was drawn: Intuit was not backing up properly.

For a company that has touted their innovation in cloud computing, redundancy, and security, it was very easy to make parallels between Intuit and Toyota, BP, and Goldman Sachs. They all claimed to be something that they were ultimately not (at least in some instances). However, Intuit did one thing that none of their embarrassed peers had the humility to do: apologize and take responsibility.

Longtime CEO of Intuit, Brad Smith wrote to all impacted customers stating,

"I deeply apologize for the pain we have caused those of you affected by this week's outage. We hold ourselves to the highest standards in dependability and customer service, and over the past two days, we have failed to live up to those expectations."

And then he took responsibility.

"My leaders and I have spoken to a number of you and there is simply no excuse for having such a negative impact on you.

And finally, he recognized that there has been a loss of trust and rightfully so.

"We will work our hardest to earn back your trust.

When viewing the sentiment of general users after this letter, there was a dramatic change. Some people had more sympathy than anger stating that they "understand and "appreciate their diligence. What a dramatic change some humble pie can make. But this is not just a case study in accountability; it is as much a case study on how social media's perceptions can be changed with the good old fashioned truth. Ironic that it happened on the same day Tony Hayward, CEO of BP spent the day denying wrong doing on Capitol Hill.