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Transformational Business Impact Finalists 2023

H&R Block

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1. What business problem(s) did your organization / project face, and why did you choose a digital adoption strategy to help you solve it?

Let’s face it – no one likes doing taxes. At H&R Block, it’s our job to make tax time as tear-free as possible. Whether you are sitting at your kitchen table using our DIY Tax Prep tool or sitting in one of our offices working face-to-face with our preparers, or if you are one of the preparers we onboard every spring, our goal is to give you a tax prep experience that is as user-friendly as it is accurate. We chose a digital adoption strategy to make digital transition easier for employees and customers with widely varying tech skills in a variety of service settings, including self-service tax prep. When it comes to digital adoption at Block, the employee experience and the customer experience are inseparable. The appointment scheduling, tax prep and onboarding tools that our employees use directly impact our customer’s experience at H&R Block.

2. How did you use WalkMe, in conjunction with other strategies and technologies, to address your challenges?

We use WalkMe on our in-office tools, the Salesforce Community site that we use as an employee community and to handle seasonal onboarding and on our DIY Tax Prep site.

We use WalkMe on our in-office tools, the Salesforce Community site that we use as an employee community and to handle seasonal onboarding and on our DIY Tax Prep site.

On DIY, we use WalkMe to supplement our in-app help system and to guide users through the steps required to fix errors on their returns and find specific information needed to complete their return. In the latest tax year, we used WalkMe to help filers whose returns were rejected correct their return so that they could then refile electronically. This improved our customers’ experience and positively impacted our business, since we get paid when a return is successfully accepted via e-file. Our use of WalkMe helped us get a 4.5-star rating and a callout by PC Mag as one of the two best tax prep tools for Tax Year 22. We are using WalkMe to collect feedback from our customers and analyze the feedback to make our product better. We also use WalkMe for short-term tweaks to our site after the site has been in code-freeze.

We used WalkMe to introduce our new employee portal, AMP, and continue to use it to promote internal events and news on the portal.

We used WalkMe to introduce our new employee portal, AMP, and continue to use it to promote internal events and news on the portal.

3. How does your digital adoption strategy, especially with regard to WalkMe, impact or benefit your end-users (customers and/or employees), your team, and leadership?

Tax prep is easier for both employees and customers. WalkMe gives us a low-effort way to help customers e-file even when they encounter errors. For instance, 72% of users whose e-file return was initially rejected due to error and who engaged the WalkMe guidance were able to e-file again.

We are using WalkMe surveys to collect feedback directly from our DIY customers, and also (via surveys in AMP) to get feedback directly to our leadership on educational events & opps.

We use WalkMe to notify our tax prep specialists and other employees about known issues within the software and give guidance on tax forms, to get in front of issues that would otherwise result in support tickets, and to lead users through workarounds so they can stay productive when there’s a glitch in the software– for instance when we had an issue with Chrome, we used WalkMe to shuttle users over to Edge. (Employee Experience)

4. How has your digital adoption strategy, especially with regard to WalkMe, helped your organization better achieve its mission, goals, or values?

WalkMe is making tax prep easier for our customers and more profitable for us: 72% of users whose e-file return was initially rejected  who engaged the WalkMe guidance were able to e-file again. It also helped us understand why customers didn’t upload previous tax returns. We used WalkMe to push a survey mid-season, and 76% of customers who saw the survey responded to it.

If preparers in office don’t reconcile their drawer at the end of the day, then financial data is inaccurate. We used WalkMe to create a daily reminder to nudge employees to reconcile their drawer, and added a launcher and Smart Walk-Thru. This tax year, the launcher was clicked 33,000 times, preventing drawer issues and increasing efficiencies.

 

Last year, we launched our new employee community called AMP. We used WalkMe to do basic training and performance support for site visitors and have extended its use as a communication tool. In the past year, site visitors have interacted with WalkMe over 3 million times.

5. What about your implementation or success makes you most proud? Why?

We’re really proud that we’ve been able to increase the support we offer to our clients and employees by providing immediate messaging at their point of need and walking them through the steps to fix their issues. Some of the solutions we implemented in self-service tax prep this year helped our clients fix errors and rejections, and we’ve seen our targeted rejection solutions help to drastically decrease the amount of clients who received IRS rejection and also decrease the calls about these rejections to our customer support center, translating to significant cost saving.

6. Please share any additional information about your role in the project, your results, and/or your vision for the future that supports your submission.

In the future, we’re going to continue to use WalkMe across the H&R Block enterprise to help our employees and clients alike. We plan to continue pushing changes that help the user with needs during the tax season and utilize WalkMe to gain valuable user feedback to influence our long-term solutions and digital enhancements.

7. OPTIONAL: If you're using WalkMe outside of the project described in this submission, please share additional examples.

We’re using WalkMe in different areas of the enterprise, described above.

8. Company Blurb

H&R Block’s purpose is simple: To provide help and inspire confidence in our clients and communities everywhere. We’ve been true to that purpose since our company was founded in 1955. Since then, we’ve prepared approximately 800 million tax returns and grown to have approximately 12,000 offices around the world. We know that tax needs and situations change. That’s why we offer new and innovative ways to prepare and file taxes so clients can choose what suits them best.

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