INTUIT QuickBooks: Reducing Support Volume & Improving Customer Retention

The Challenge

QuickBooks Online is a critical tool for millions of small businesses, but its billing and subscription management experience was a major pain point for customers. Confusing workflows, unclear pricing structures, and a lack of self-service options resulted in a staggering 20% of all customer support cases being billing-related. This not only led to frustrated users and high churn rates but also cost Intuit millions in unnecessary support overhead.

The challenge was to redesign the billing experience from the ground up, reducing friction, improving transparency, and enabling customers to manage their subscriptions with minimal intervention. My role was to lead research, strategy, and execution for a complete overhaul of the QuickBooks Online billing and subscription experience.

The Approach

I spearheaded a cross-functional effort to diagnose the root causes of user frustration and build a customer-first, scalable billing experience. This initiative combined deep qualitative research, service blueprinting, and iterative design prototyping to ensure that every aspect of the billing journey was intuitive and efficient.

Key focus areas included:

• Identifying friction points through longitudinal customer support data to uncover patterns in confusion, failed transactions, and escalation triggers.
• Redesigning the billing UI and workflows to provide clear, transparent subscription management, including upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, and renewals.
• Implementing proactive, in-product messaging and support tools to reduce reliance on live support agents.
• Streamlining error resolution and payment troubleshooting, ensuring that customers could self-diagnose and fix billing issues without escalating to support.
• Testing iterative improvements through live A/B experiments, continuously refining solutions based on behavioral analytics and direct customer feedback.

This work required tight collaboration between product, design, engineering, data science, and customer support teams, aligning stakeholders on a shared vision for a seamless, frustration-free billing experience.

The Impact

The redesigned QuickBooks billing experience delivered massive improvements in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency, resulting in:

• A significant reduction in billing-related support cases, eliminating millions of dollars in annual support costs.
• Improved customer retention and satisfaction, with clearer workflows reducing frustration and involuntary churn.
• A shift from reactive to proactive support, where users could resolve issues independently, decreasing escalation rates.
• A more scalable, future-proof billing system, improving subscription management across all QuickBooks products.

By using a data-driven, human-centered approach, we transformed the QuickBooks billing experience from one of the biggest friction points into a seamless, intuitive process that saved Intuit millions while vastly improving the user experience.

Why It Matters

Billing isn’t just a backend process—it’s a critical user experience touchpoint that directly impacts retention, support costs, and customer trust. By leading the strategy, research, and execution of this overhaul, I helped Intuit turn a major problem into a long-term competitive advantage, proving that well-designed service experiences can drive both customer loyalty and business growth.