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:
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:
