TurboTax
Error remediation
Two big problems for customers trying to file their taxes in TurboTax: hard-to-understand financial jargon and unresolvable filing errors were causing abandonment and increasing expensive customer support contacts.
Task
Customers trust TurboTax to guide them to correctly filing their taxes. After importing tax info, missing details are highlighted immediately but complex errors are only found at the very end, once the entire return is reviewed.
Customers have to then try to understand overly technical messages, go back to completed tax forms to find the potential errors, and figure out how to resolve error loops if their correction causes new errors.
Qualtrics Mar '23
"I'm not a tax expert. I need clear instructions if something is wrong."
Usertesting.com Jun '23
"It's frustrating to review this the third time... it's still telling me there is an error."
Usertesting.com Jun '23
"Some of the information could be updated for me. I entered this on another form... just fix it for me."
Actions
To reduce friction and simplify the customer experience, I brought the error notifications up immediately after importing data and allowed the customers to review their imported original form. I also grouped related errors together and simplified error messages to make them easy to understand.
If customers were unable to resolve errors by the end of a topic, an AI-guided experience walked them through each error, step-by-step, narrowing in on possible solutions.
Results
My improvements in communicating error messages, providing proactive error resolution paths, and helping customers recover from confusing errors enabled faster, more accurate tax filings for over 30 million customers. This furthered TurboTax’s commitment to getting taxes done for everyone by making tax filing easy.
21%
Reduction in errors at final review
11.9%
Decrease to customer abandonment
75%
Of customers who engaged, fixed all errors
