On top of that, most consumers are either unaware that their bill is negotiable, or they just don’t have the time or energy to engage with companies to lower their rate.
“This makes it difficult to monitor rising costs. “Consumers have more subscriptions and monthly payments to keep track of than ever before,” said Varun Krishna, Senior Vice President and Head of Consumer Finance with Intuit Consumer Group. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of payments and changing rates, or even realize that there are opportunities to negotiate costs. And with subscriptions for services increasing yearly - with the average consumer opting into 9 monthly subscriptions,* the number of bills consumers are handling continues to grow. In partnership with Ape圎dge’s Billshark, Mint suggests areas where users could save on monthly payments, and then connects them with Billshark to negotiate rates on their behalf.Ĭonsumers may be overpaying on monthly payments, including internet, phone, and television bills. Today, Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU), the global technology platform that makes TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp, announced Bill Negotiation in Mint, which can help cut down users’ monthly bill and subscription payments by hundreds of dollars. Better options are a click away.Intuit’s Mint partners with Billshark to offer users an easy way to negotiate bill and subscription costs, saving customers hundreds of dollars on their bills We don’t need to speak again to the simplicity of Google, or the ease of Twitter - it goes without saying that consumers don’t have to put up with anything that is not superior. Online, poor designs are ignored and only great design bubbles to the surface. While some folks would no doubt be concerned about the security of any web-based financial planning tool, clearly Mint had no trouble attracting customers who felt that the reward outweighed any potential risk. The assumption is that things in the digital world are no more or less secure than those pieces of information floating around on pieces of paper or in file cabinets. Second, many people are increasingly comfortable sharing all kinds of data for the sake of convenience. Every competitive product needs to be at people’s fingertips, on the phone, on the web, everywhere. Increasingly, customers expect everything - in the immortal words of Robert Wodruff, the man who made fizzy sugar water into Coke - to be “within an arm’s length of desire”. In addition, took advantage of a couple very important trends that all firms should be watching:
We have simplified decision-making processes with a number of clients - not just the choice model but the total experience - and seen immediate, material increases in revenue because we made the choice process more facile.
Instead, it causes the customer to feel overwhelmed and walk away. We know from our work in Behavioral Economics that too much clutter and too many choices can freeze customer decision-making. Even Scott Cook, the legendary CEO of Intuit, could not pull it off and the odd are good that your firm has this problem, too. As John’s friend Jim Rogers noted, “Organizations are like households - they tend to fill the attic and basement with too much stuff, and it takes discipline to remove it.”įrom a human standpoint, it is easier for executives to say “yes” to a new product or feature than to say “no.” It takes even more work to kill an existing service or offering. It is the natural tendency of all firms, product lines, governments and even households to build up too much complexity - complexity that adds little value. Why did the company that made its mark with a simple user interface (the very name “Intuit” is a riff on “intuitive”) have to buy Mint? Why couldn’t they have built it themselves? We’ve been pondering that question, and we think it’s because it is very hard for a complex organization to build something simple. According to the New York Times, they have tracked over $200,000,000,000 in spending and have 1.5 million users, meaning that Intuit is paying over $100 per user. Mint is a web- and phone-based tool with a simple design interface that helps people manage their finances in an integrated way - across all their credit cards and asset accounts. This post was co-authored with Paul D’Alessandro.