Holiday Shopping : What consumers will buy most of this season

• Pricing: This theme captures what the user thinks on the pricing of the product, the frequency of paid updates, affordability of the product, worthiness in terms of the features offered and comparison with competitor pricing.
  Sample keywords: Reasonable pricing, value for what it costs, inexpensive, cost-effective, etc.
• Accessibility: This includes the users’ feeling of how easy or difficult it is to access QuickBooks from any place or from multiple devices as it is cloud based.
  Sample keywords: Can be used anywhere at any time, easily accessible, etc.
• User-friendly: This theme relates to the easiness in usage of the product and its features, whether the support documents help in making the product user friendly, whether there are any tutorials provided by Intuit in making the users comfortable in working with the product, the simplicity of setting up or installing the product, user interface reviews, new user experiences with the product usage, navigability within the software all feature under this theme.
  Sample keywords: Easy to use, simple, simplicity, user-friendly, etc.
• Multiuser Ability: It covers conversations relating to any access restrictions or clarity of usage in the software in case of a multi-user environment, the problems on switching between single and multi-user modes and whether the transfer of User License facility is available or not.
  Sample keywords: Ability to have multiple users, ability to collaborate, etc.
• Banking Feeds: This encompasses the integration of bank accounts with QuickBooks Online and feasibility of the same in terms of sync time, transaction rate, live feeds, etc.
  Sample keywords: Banking, deposits to bank, bank account, etc.
• Customer Support: This predominantly deals with the kind of customer interaction they have. It could be simple appreciation or complaints regarding inexperienced staff who could not answer issues, the long hold times, language barriers, unethical practices of forcing the customer to upgrade to a newer version for having the ability to continue using their existing features, etc.
  Sample keywords: Online training, customer service, served us well, etc.
• Updates: Stability, frequency, choice, pricing, additional features offered, worthiness and satisfaction with the update will be discussed here.
  Sample keywords: Frequent updates, pushed towards online version, etc.
• Reporting: Ease of creating, modifying and customising reports and comparison of reporting options with that of its competitors will be highlighted here.
  Sample keywords: Detailed reporting, relevant reports, reporting capabilities, etc.
• Invoicing: Facilities with respect to creation and publishing of invoices within QuickBooks and among the competitors, batch invoicing capability and sharing the invoices through Email are topic that will fall under this theme.
  Sample keywords: Invoice management, invoicing, invoice number, billing history, etc.
• Accounting: How good and error free is QuickBooks with respect to inventory management, income & expense tracking, tax calculation compatibilities across different states of the US and across different countries.
  Sample keywords: expense tracking, tax calculation, bookkeeping, accounting, etc.
• Integration: Integration of the QuickBooks software with other software for additional capabilities, performance of credit card and payroll integrations and the efficiency of QuickBooks Sync Manager are captured under this theme.
  Sample keywords: Sync with QuickBooks, integrate with software databases, etc.
• Performance: The few topics discussed here would be - Is the performance fast? Is it subjected to frequent hangs or crashes? Does the data get corrupted upon migration from one version to another?
  Sample keywords: Accurate, helpful, fast, slow in operation, time-consuming, etc.
• Payroll Services: Efficiency of the payroll service, complaints of issues while transferring the payroll to the employees like loss the transfer in between, etc. fall into this category.
  Sample keywords: payroll feature, employee payroll, payroll services, etc.
• Customization: Customization facilities with respect to reporting, invoices, accounting, etc. fall under this category.
  Sample keywords: Easy to customize, lots of features, customizable templates, etc.
• Security: Data security, extent of data retrieval during an outage, lossless data transfer, holding the funds and accounts of users for reasons unknown, unapproved automatic charges on credit cards are few concerns covered here.
  Sample keywords: Reliable, loss of data, backup

• Customer Service: Complaints regarding poor customer support like long hold times, unpleasant approach to queries, unethical behaviour, and language barrier issue come under this segment.
  Sample keywords: Worst service, lies after lies, unorganized, unethical, no chat room, etc.
• Forced Upgrade: Unsatisfied with the forced upgrade for no reason, upgrades involving a higher pricing structure, features being disabled with older versions are few concerns that fall under this category.
  Sample keywords: Forced to upgrade, not compatible, update software, recent version, etc.
• Transaction Processing Issues: Payment outage, complaints of frequent service down, processor failure, payment transfer failure from customer to users, etc., are considered in this section.
  Sample keywords: Payment, transaction issues, invoice, not able to receive money, etc.
• High Pricing: Unnecessary high charges levied frequently, sometimes for unacceptable reasons are captured here.
  Sample keywords: Hundreds of dollars, scam, grabbing your money, additional fee, etc.
• Security: Risk of personal information being hacked and misused are predominantly discussed in this theme.
  Sample keywords: Bug, corrupt, incompatible data, protection, additional support, etc.
• Refund Arguments: Refund related arguments are classified here.
  Sample keywords: No refund, late refund, cannot refund, register again, etc.
• Payroll Issues: Service corruption issues and payroll transfer issues to the employees are major concerns in this section.
  Sample keywords: Re-reconcile, loss of payroll records, payroll issues, etc.
• Data Loss: Issues with respect to loss of data or misuse/corruption of data is raised in this segment.
  Sample keywords: Loss of data, unable to import or transfer data, information loss, etc.
• Update Issues: Software or feature-related issues faced while updating from one version to other come under this type.
  Sample keywords: Cannot downgrade, compatibility issues, unsatisfied, forced, etc.
• Software Issues: Complaints on unfriendly nature of the product, frequent crashes, and easy corruption of software are classified under this group heading.
  Sample keywords: Unfriendly, require frequent updates, virus issues, customization, etc.
• Issues in downloads: Problems in downloading transactions or on the downloaded transactions will be covered in this topic.
  Sample keywords: Unable to download/encrypt/restore data, incorrect format, etc.
• Holds money, account, and documents: Accusations of Intuit trying to unnecessarily hold users’ money, accounts, and documents are the major issues in this heading.
  Sample keywords: Hold back funds, unusual activity, high credit card bills, etc.
• Invoice Issues: Problems related to Invoices especially failures in emailing invoices
  Sample keywords: Duplicate data or missing data in invoices, missing email statements, etc.
• Fraudulent Acts: Charges of fraud against Intuit are recorded here.
  Sample keywords: Fraudulent charge, account was hacked, data integrity lost, etc.
• License Transfer Issues: Comments expressing dissatisfaction with the inability to transfer licenses will fall in this segment.
  Sample keywords: Multiple user license, unable to transfer license, register again, etc.
• Migration Issues: Migration from desktop to online and the subsequent issues like the positives of desktop version being overshadowed will be mentioned here.
  Sample keywords: Sync problems, invoice issues, unfriendly, old version not supported, etc.

Observation: Here, we observed that QBO has the lowest average rating score and the highest proportion of 2 & 1 star ratings.

Procedure: For this analysis, close competitors of QuickBooks Online product such as Xero, FreshBooks, Sage and Wave was considered and the ratings given for these products by the reviewers of g2crowd.com were normalised. They were then classified into three buckets - ‘positive’ if they had a 5 or 4 star, ‘neutral’ if they had a 3 star and ‘negative’ if they were rated 2 or below.

Representation: The color-coding for positive as green, neutral as yellow and negative as red is also reflective of the overall sentiment of the product with respect to its competitors.

Observation: The data obtained was the analysed to see where these products were predominantly being used. It can be observed that QuickBooks Desktop was being used widely in the Accounting vertical, QuickBooks Online being used in Accounting and Marketing verticals almost equally, Xero and Sage were used the most in Information Technology & Services while FreshBooks and Sage were being preferred in the Marketing & Advertising vertical. Also, while ‘Small Merchants, prefer QuickBooks Online over the rest, the product that gained momentum in the ‘Mid-Market’ and ‘Enterprise’ categories was Sage.

Furthermore, since QuickBooks Online product was aimed at catering to the accounting needs of small and medium businesses, dislikes and negative sentiment associated with the product is a major concern for Intuit.

Procedure: QuickBooks Online product was compared with QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, FreshBooks, Sage and Wave for the ratings, usage of the products across different industry verticals and company sizes. The reviews from g2crowd.com were scrapped using Python, along with the details of the reviewer such as role, experience, industry information, size of company and, likes and dislikes for the product. G2crowd.com identified the industry verticals and classified the size of the company based on the user information provided on their respective LinkedIn accounts.

Representation:

• The ratings were on a scale of 1-5. The intensity of the green colour represents the rating given with dark green being 5 and light green being 1.
• The length of the bar in the graphs under the industry heading is indicative of the number of users for the product belonging to the respective verticals mentioned on the y-axis.
• The pie-chart represents the ratio of users for the products where ‘blue’ represents small businesses, ‘orange’ represents mid-market businesses, ‘grey’ represents large enterprises and ‘yellow’ indicates the unavailability of this detail for certain users.

Observation: It was observed that the users associate positive sentiment features such as Accessibility and Multi-user Ability, etc., and negative sentiment towards Customer Support and Security Issues. User-Friendliness (associated with negative sentiment) of the product and Accessibility (associated with positive sentiment) are the two topics being widely mentioned with respect to QuickBooks Online.

Procedure: To understand how the users perceive the different features of the product, conversation data was scrapped from g2crowd.com. There were around 120 reviews specific to QuickBooks Online. The reviews were then assigned a polarity score based on set of key sentiment words and the combination of their occurrences in the conversation. Themes bringing out the perceptions on the different features of the product were listed and the conversations were flagged under all the relevant themes they were reflecting.

Representation: The ‘red’ colour indicates negative sentiment while ‘green’ indicates positive. The intensity of the colour is indicative of the intensity of the sentiment (with dark shade representing high intensity). The size of the bubble is indicative of the number of conversations for that topic.

Observation: Reflective of the inference from the analysis of conversations in g2crowd.com, here again customer service and fraudulent acts are the key areas of concern for the users.

Procedure: To identify the complaint areas for QuickBooks Online product, around 117 reviews were downloaded from consumeraffairs.com, a website where the users expressed their concerns more than accolades. The topics of concern were identified and the reviews were categorised accordingly.

Representation: The size of the bubbles in the graph is representative of the volume of the conversations belonging to that particular theme. The greater the size of the bubble, greater is the expression of concern for that topic.

Observations: Although, online version of the product has better accessibility, multi-user ability and security features, It can be seen that users prefer desktop version to the online version in terms of performance on dimensions like reporting, accounting, invoicing and payroll services. Customer support, pricing, updates and search option are areas associated with negative sentiment for both the versions which should be a major concern for Intuit.

Procedure: In order to migrate users from Desktop to Online version of the product, it is necessary to understand how the users perceive the features offered by the desktop version in comparison to what is being offered by the online version. Therefore, a similar analysis was performed were conversations regarding QuickBooks Desktop were scrapped, assigned polarity score and classified under the different themes indicative of the features they were highlighting. The results were then compared with user perception for QuickBooks Online.

Representation:

• The user perception towards different features of Desktop and Online version were viewed alongside each other using a butterfly graph representation. The length of the bar is indicative of the topic affinity for the product (given as a percentage of conversations) and the colour of the bar indicates the sentiment with respect to that feature for each product individually, with ‘red’ colour being negative and ‘green’ colour being positive. Here again, the intensity of the colour represents the intensity of the sentiment (with dark shade representing high intensity).
• A simple bubble chart was also plotted where size of the bubble represented the combined topic affinity and the distance of the bubble from the logo indicated how each theme was being fascinated by the users.