With a name like Intuit, you may think of a company that is “heads up” and good at being “intuitive,” or at least would be working very hard to make themselves appear to be intuitive. I say nay nay.  This Intuit has stuck its eskimo head stuck in the snow.

As Intuit continues to “improve” their software and services, like many software companies, they feed their machine by turning out relatively useless “upgrades” every year. The company’s latest move in this direction again goes against serving their customers’ interests. 

The company is already notorious for forcing relatively useless “upgrades” on their client base every couple of years by discontinuing basic services if you don’t have the relatively latest software version.  I don’t recall the last time that we needed or used one of their “improvements”  but we dutifully have to upgrade every couple of years anyway.

In their latest marketing services blunder, they’ve turned off the ability for you to email invoices from your own company through your own mail servers, leaving only a few options like Gmail or Hotmail, UNLESS you pay for one of a few of Intuit’s additional services (not related to emailing your invoices.) These are services that to date that you haven’t used and evidently don’t need. 

According to their tech support agent, “you will have to use web mail for any company files that do not have a valid subscription associated with them.” That subscription is not for email, but for one of Intuit’s additional services.   I asked their support agent if there was a work around for this, but unfortunately there isn’t.

I have 3 companies with 3 separate QuickBooks files. For one of them, we use one of Intuit’s additional services, their payroll service. I’ve found their payroll service to be a much better value than ADP and Paychex. I actually like it a lot. With the other two companies, one a small company and the other a non-profit, we simply don’t need any of Intuit’s additional services. Read that to mean that Intuit has not created an additional service of any real value to us for those companies.

Intuit wants to force current customers to pay for something they don’t need by taking away something as routine as sending out your invoices via email.  That’s BAD marketing and customer service.  That’s the way companies lose clients. 

I’ve been a Quicken and QuickBooks user for literally decades, but with this latest act of ‘Customer Service,” they are encouraging me to consider other options.  For a piece of software that back in the day I never thought I’d replace, Intuit’s lack of intuition has opened the door for me to want to consider other options. They no longer own my Choice Set for this category.

Later this week, I’ll talk about a company that keeps doing it right, to stay at the top of my Choice Set in their category: Panera Bread.

If you’ve had any similar experiences like this, please share them below.