171: The Part of the Experience AI Shouldn't Own (ft. Mike Halvorsen)

Speaker A: Mike Helvorson, vice president of customer experience for H and R Block. Teams doing testing in Chicago this week, trying to figure out what do they expect from H and R Block and how we use AI. It's been pretty clear and pretty consistent that they don't want H and R Block to use AI to do their taxes. There's a lack of trust on sort of two level. One level is there's a concern that it will be done right if technology does it and gets it wrong. The other part of that is a concern about the data. I trust the person that I can see and talk. Talk to with my data more than this technology. Mike Helvorson, vice president of customer experience for H and R Block. At H and R Block, we measure ourselves in tax season. So this is my fourth tax season. Joined in September of 2022. Prior to that, I was with Kohl's department stores leading product and experience teams, uh, and the dot com team for about 14 years.

Speaker B: Wow. Okay, so before we jump into. I know, I know where we're going to go today, but before we jump in, I want to hear a little bit more of that story from going from Kohl's, you know, retail, I assume there's kind of this point of sale. There's data, there's distribution. What was the bridge like between that and tax software?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a big jump. Part of me, I would say, after 14 years in retail, got a little tired of. And it was in E commerce that whole time, by the way. Yeah, uh, competing with Amazon is really hard when you're in E commerce. Um, but at the same time, it's, you know, the. There are a lot of parallels to the financial service industry, to the tax industry at H and R Block. You know, for me, at Kohl's, it was about delivering amazing experiences, uh, for customers who are shopping for khaki pants or.

Speaker B: That is a very Kohl's thing. You're right. You're right.

Speaker A: Yeah. And, um, you know, for that, like, and it was sort of inconsequential when you think about it, like, if we made mistakes, uh, selling, uh, inexperiences, selling people pants, we were still just selling people pants. Coming over to the financial service industry, coming to H and R Block, there were a couple of things that were really interesting to me. Coming to a company that was. Had much more regulation. There was. The stakes were higher for people. Taxes are really important for customers, but it's still delivering an awesome customer experience and that opportunity to not only make that Experience better but also start to grow other financial products. Um, you know, we had previously to my joint joining about nine months before I, before I joined Block, we launched the new digital banking product so Spruce Mobile. And the idea that we could come and make H and R Block and build this experience that was more than just taxes, more than a one and done transaction, but really a year long relationship through financial products, through delivering financial wellness was a really exciting opportunity for me.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean you mentioned the, you measure your tenure there at HR Block by tax season. I think the folks that I know because Kansas City, you know, is the headquarters for H and R Block, the folks that I know that have gone through or uh, are part of that team. One of the challenges they said, is everything either we have to deploy by X date because and then everything freezes right during tax season or you think of things in cycles where it's like, okay, are we going to be able to get this done in the next nine months? Because we, there's a X number, a month window where everything just has to work and nobody can touch anything. You know, uh, but now with you actually having even more products in the mix where you're supporting something that more has an annualization to it that's, you know, you've got, you gotta keep pace and have these peaks and valleys cycles, that's, that's an interesting way to think about it.

Speaker A: It is. And I'll tell you what, in my, you know, now this my fourth year through, fourth tax season through, we are much more open as an organization to testing and learning in tax season. When I got here, it was like that was uh, an absolute no go. Like.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's changed then. Good.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, December 31st hit and there was nothing left to do but sit and fix any problems that came up. Um, you know, I really credit Curtis Campbell, our new CEO for really driving a learning culture and recognizing the importance of testing and iterating. And we're going to get our, our best and biggest learnings in tax season. Yeah. Now of course we can't do people's taxes wrong incorrectly. Like that is uh, a non starter. But the ability to actually test experiences to launch new things, uh, you know, to put a new experience out in front of 5% of, of customers or a small subset of tax pros in our offices. You know, that's something that we're starting to do so that we can get those learnings and just as an organization move so much faster because the pace of change is just, it's so important to get those learnings. We can't wait until next, next tax season to, to get ordering.

Speaker B: I mean, you talked about the pace of change. Let's just go right there. It feels like in the last, well, in the last tax season, let's just call it what it is. In the last 12 weeks, 10, 12 weeks, the rate of changes, the sense is that it's. The velocity has increased even more. Models are getting better. AI is everywhere now. You know, one could say that this AI is a place where people might go ask an AI for help with their taxes. Uh, how are you thinking about first, just the AI strategy and then. Yeah, what's influencing the way that you think about the fact that traditionally H and R Block has had a workforce of incredibly talented, smart people are supporting their clients?

Speaker A: Yeah, there's, we think about AI really in sort of three levels. One is how can we leverage AI internally to really streamline work? So allow us, whether it be our product and design teams using it, our marketing teams using it to augment their work, or even our tax pros, uh, who are in our offices, uh, serving our clients. We have a new AI enabled tool that helps sort of an ask answer type experience for them that it can actually go in and get, pull out all of our knowledge articles. It's all proprietary data. It's not going out to the web to get, you know, data that could be, you know, false. It's really pulling on our corpus of data around tax to help answer really complex questions. Now, uh, most of our tax pros can answer almost any question posed to them, but it's always good to have that ability when something really complex or unique comes up, that they can really easily get to that answer for a client, um, rather than making that client wait. So that's just been a huge improvement in that experience for our clients and for our tax pros. You know, the second part of that is, you know, how are customers using or expecting us to use AI? And that's something that we're learning. In fact, I've got teams in Chicago doing testing with customers this week, trying to figure out what do they expect from H and R Block and how we use AI.

Speaker B: Uh, interesting. That's a different framing. How do they, what do they expect from you?

Speaker A: And one of the really interesting learnings that we're getting, and this has been consistent by the way they typically, when they come in, the clients that we're talking to or the customers we're talking to, they expect they like to use AI to answer inconsequential questions, you know, they'll jump on ChatGPT or Claude or whatever their preferred LLM is and they'll ask the question their questions and get answers, and that's fine. It's been pretty clear and pretty consistent that they don't want H and R Block to use AI to do their taxes. And I think that that's an interesting learning because there's a lack of trust and sort of trust issue.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: One level is there's a concern that it will be done right, by the way, if technology does it and gets it wrong. Well, who's, you know, to use the, the old, uh, phrase, who's the throat to choke in that.

Speaker B: Who's accountable?

Speaker A: Right, yeah. Who's accountable? The other, you know, the other part of that is a concern about the data. And I don't want my data out there in AI and to be used by AI for anything I trust. And we're hearing this pretty consistently. I trust the person that I can see and talk to with my data more than this technology.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So that's really where we're trying to learn, like, what is the role of AI in something like doing people's taxes, which is a very stressful moment in people's lives. Can be. Obviously, uh, it's a, it's a moment or an experience filled with a lot of pii, um, that we have to protect. So the third part of AI and where we're experimenting in is really how people are using it to make decisions. And that's where we've got a lot of tests running with various LLMs on how we can become more discoverable and start to deliver elevated experiences to start to build confidence in the LLM itself. So if somebody goes to ChatGPT and starts asking tax questions and it' clear they need to set up an appointment, can we get them to set up an appointment with H and R Block in chatgpt versus just send. And send them to our website because, you know, we're trying to remove that friction of going from where you are to someplace else to try to start navigating through, uh, a website that you've never been to before. How do we just remove that friction altogether and make that moment of engagement happen in the LLM itself?

Speaker B: Well, and I think you, especially with the brand of H and R Block, you have this opportunity. You know, I don't know, I'm not claiming that you're doing this, but with the partnership with GPT being able to say we want to be one of the earliest. I'm trying to remember what they're calling it, the little apps that'll be running in the feed that says, hey, when they're asking this, we want to show up. Um, and that's really exciting because. Well, it's exciting for me because it's actually a UX problem. Right. It's a user experience problem. That's, that's my. One of my passion areas is like, trying to figure out how do we meet people where they are and not ask them to go kind of jump through the loops that AI requires you to do, which is like really, really smart interactions right here. But then to do anything else useful in the world, you kind of have to leave it, copy and paste it, go use a markdown file to figure it out or whatever that is and go someplace else. And what I hear you saying is you've got that opportunity to meet them where they are.

Speaker A: That's right. And you know, one of the things in leveraging what we're consistently hearing from the customers we're talking to and their desire to have there be a human engagement. Yeah. Ah, yeah, you know, we are. I've had a couple of conversations with some of the teams at Google around how do we incorporate a human expert into a Gemini or into an AI mode experience? Love that. Because when you're thinking about taxes, mistakes happen. And you can remove one of the humans from the, from the equation if you decide to remove the person who understands taxes, the tax pro. But the person still involved in that experience is the tax filer. Right. And they are the ones that probably more often than not make the mistakes. So if we're, if, if we don't have somebody there to guide them as to what forms they need, what information is pertinent, um, they can make bad decisions, can happen naturally. So, you know, we've been talking with them about how do we. In those moments where there's a lot of tax questions happening and somebody, it's clear somebody's trying to maybe do their own taxes or figure out how they're going to do their taxes. Can we create a human connection with an expert that can just answer questions and importantly ask the right questions to get the right answers back from, from the client.

Speaker B: It's interesting, you know, if you, for maybe some of our listeners that are in the kind of product world or in the, you know, software development life cycle space, there might be listening to like a Lenny's podcast or to one of these other, um, you know, product management podcasts that have gone almost all in on talking to anthropic and OpenAI, you know, folks or cursor, folks, et cetera. That's great. There's a place for that because that's kind of the cutting bleeding edge of what's possible with AI but what it ends up creating is this echo chamber of AI will do everything for all things, for everybody, all the time. And it's, it's you. And we must move faster. And a hundred percent of code is, is deployed by, you know, by AI, et cetera. Fine. In the big tech space. That's great. The rest of the world, I go back to my wife who's a nurse. She's like, she has to remind me and kind of put me back in my place. She's like, george, the rest of the world doesn't care. Like we just, we want, we want our stuff private. We want to talk to another human being and we want to trust what we're working with. And it sounds to me like you're leaning or actually not even leaning into it. You're like responding to the needs of the market saying this is what I want from you.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean you, technology uh, can deliver convenience. Right? And that's what you know, really AI is in, in a way delivering the same type of convenience that Amazon has in delivering products to you within a couple of hours. There's ah, a component though around you talked about trust. We call it confidence. I like that there's an importance that it's that, that I can, I'm confident that this company is one I can trust. I'm confident that they uh, did my taxes correctly or that they are going to do right by me. And the human in the loop in that experience is just such an important component because there is sort of this just natural mistrust of technology by many people, maybe most people.

Speaker B: Well, and even more so I think in the U.S. right. I think that's a, that's as a strong narrative, uh, if you look at kind of the juxtaposition and we don't have to go to a globalization of this, but in the juxtaposition of you're mostly serving U.S. clients, uh, because doing U.S. taxes, that definitely when I talk to my friends who are in the UK or even in Asia, uh, kind of based organizations, they're saying like, no, we're all like hoping it's our savior. It's like, no, the narrative is slightly different here. Like we really want to make sure that we, you know, I think we've gone through the technology cycles like you've mentioned. We want to make sure. This is, this is being done. Right. Uh, so I love that you're leaning into this. I use the language, which is great because that's some language that I've been using as well. Not only just the human in the loop, which is good, but like this expert in the loop, like you're actually thinking about. No, we really want the experts to be at the table saying, sure, we expected that you were going to do a little bit of chatting to figure out what am I supposed to do? What's the best way to approach this? Now we're here to help. That's, that's powerful, I think.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. And that's what we're hearing from, from, from customers. And it's so important, I think. So often when these new technologies come out, we, we scramble. When we're delivering, trying to deliver an experience, we want to be the first or maybe the second to market, be the second to market with, uh, with the new experience. But we want to be right there.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And sometimes we forget that at the end of the day, it's got to make sense to the person we're serving. And for us, it's our clients that need to do their taxes. And, you know, we are, you know, certainly we can't ignore any new technologies that come along because, you know, this irrelevant delivers such a level of, uh, convenience.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, and it is a very interesting technology and people are using it, so we need to learn from it. But you got to be really careful with the investments you make and how far you go. Um, because you don't want to go so far that you forget your, your customer base. And they say, I'm going to go find, uh, a one tax service down the street because I don't have to go through this experience that you guys have delivered.

Speaker B: So maybe come back to how your team's thinking about this in house then. So when you're, when you're working with your folks on, uh, on your product side or on your technology side, and you already mentioned that comfortability of iterating and testing and maybe, you know, dividing or segmenting your audience to kind of say, let's test with the, you know, our Chicago clients, let's go here. How do you think about the, the short term, long term strategy of what you want to test? Now with this kind of human in the loop, where do you kind of go, well, let's push it a little bit further, but then throttle back. Like, how does that work from a kind of strategic planning cycle, knowing that the models are Changing so fast. How are you even keeping up with how to look? I don't know. I'll just say personally, when somebody says, what's your five year plan? I'm like, no one knows their five year plan right now. Right. Um, I'm thinking about what's happening in the next six months because it's, it's moving that fast. How are you thinking about strategically planning such a large organization that has so many customers? How are you throttling that?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean for us that's a great question. Um, and I'm hopeful I can provide a, ah, sufficient answer. Um, I would say for us we are watching the trends of how people are, the behaviors that they're exhibiting. We're seeing less people come to our website naturally because they used to come to us to get answers and they're getting those answers in the LLMs themselves. We know that there is a desire for more virtual experiences, for easier experiences. We've got, you know, our, our pillars around ease, expertise and empathy that we know we need to deliver. But how does technology bring a level of consistency to an experience that's so, so based on human expertise or human, you know, historically for us, you know, we don't want to disrupt our existing clients that come back to us every year and have an expectation who they're working with, what the process has been and they like that process. And it's important that we maintain that and continue to make that a better experience for those people. Yeah, the way we really think about testing and learning into these new experiences is with the people that are coming to us for the first time. Um, they don't have an expectation set, they don't know how H and R Block does taxes. They might have worked with the CPA or an independent or you know, one of the other online um, uh, DIY solutions. We are using uh, a portion of those uh, customers that are coming to us to test out all sorts of new experiences to see if you know, we can get them in to set up an account at a higher rate to see if we can get them into uh, and connected with a tax pro earlier in the process. And what happens to conversion and what happens to customer satisfaction when we create a human connection earlier than we have in the past? Because you know, we're trying to use technology to create a human connection more than technology to replace the human.

Speaker B: Um, love that.

Speaker A: Um, so that's really a focus for us right now for when somebody comes to the website and shows a level of intent. How do we deepen that confidence and deepen that relationship as early as we can.

Speaker B: I've seen some things posted recently that as AI has risen, that there's been actually a higher demand in services. Meaning to the, to your point of this, like, now that people know more things, in some ways they realize they need more help. Right. And it's kind of like the old, the old thing is like, the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. And I think in some ways it sounds like you're able to unlock, especially those folks that maybe don't have a preconceived notion of what it look means to work with H and R Block, to say, hey, as you're going down this path, let's see if we can engage you faster. Because we know, we know you didn't come to our website to ask the traditional way of engaging us, signing up for an account, et cetera. We know you were probably gpting it or clotting it or whatever your favorite thing is. How can we meet you faster to go now that you're here, let's bring you in. And we're going to help because the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. And we're, we're here to, to fill in that gap. That gets really powerful.

Speaker A: Yeah, well. And, and in that experience, how quickly can we deliver a value.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: To that customer? Because we are going to ask you a lot of questions. If you're going to use us to do taxes, we got to ask you a lot of questions. You know, we're going to need your Social Security number. We're going to need your driver's license. We're going to need some information. We're going to need your, your tax forms. So there is going, there's going to be an onus on customers coming to us, especially for the first time. But in that experience, how do we deliver value and connection? So I talked about connecting with a human, but also how do we sprinkle in moments of value so that as customers are in the moment trying to make a decision, do they work with us? Do they go to the independent. That's, you know, in their. Down the street from them, maybe down the street from us, who's, uh, also down the street?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Um, the customer. Um, how do we give them more value than they're going to find on another website or with another tax provider?

Speaker B: Are you thinking about doing that in, like, contextually meeting them where they're at? So if, like, if the. I'm just hypothetically here if you know that the person's some stage within the workflow, you've, you've gathered enough information, you've asked them enough questions, which if we're thinking kind of the AI world, you're just, you're inferencing their, their context. Right. Then can you make these more custom suggestions along the way?

Speaker A: We're certainly testing our way into those. We, we don't know. We've said, we, we believe that delivery and value in the moment and we've gone out and captured all sorts of examples of people. Really well. Yeah, um, what are those things that people want? We don't know the answer to that, but we do know that, um, that that delivers ah, a better experience to customers when for instance, somebody gives us a Social Security number and their email address and we can do a dark web scan for them in the moment. Yeah, um, and that's like a, that's, that costs us relatively nothing and it provides to them tangible value. Like we did this thing and then by the way, we found a couple of data breaches and how about we give you a month or three months or six months of credit monitoring? You know, we're, we're testing these things so that we can say to customers, hey, we are going to be here to support you through this experience. And technology enables that. AI enables some of that. Yeah, of course, the importance, sort of the backbone of the experience for H and R Block will eventually be within that experience. The ability to connect directly with a human, um, and know that person that is doing my taxes and I can see their picture and I can chat with them live and I can set up a virtual touch, ah, base with them or I can drive over to the office and meet with them face to face. I know they exist and that's going to drive my confidence and my trust in this brand. I've gotten a lot of great value upfront, but then that's sort of the backbone of the experience.

Speaker B: So you're using the opportunity for kind of those surprise and delight moments to say, no, I, I want to just build one more like, um, node in the network of trust. Right. Like, hey, this is just one more reason that we want you to get closer to us. Right. Um, um. And then I think that's something interesting that you, you're leaning into the kind of, this promise of what I think of like as the promise of proximity. Um, I talk about a lot and I've, I've said this in the podcast before, that I think that as AI continues to rise, that we'll actually see that the unique value proposition while being in perspective, be, be being in person with people. Right. Um, that will be, that will become the novelty. It will be like, I can't, I can't reproduce that any other way. I'll know it's real. I'll know that they care. I'll know that there's a relationship and that truly that's where I. It's something I can quite literally physically trust. Um, you're driving people. You're actually kind of saying now even with all this technology, even all the surprise and delight, even with all this insight that we can bring to the table, ultimately we see the value of this human to human interaction is why we exist. That's.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. And we look at that really as our differentiators of brand. I mean, there's not another brand, uh, in our space that has the office, the number of offices we have across the country, and I forget the exact number, but within five miles of almost every citizen in the United States, you can drive to an H and R Block office and meet with someone wild. I mean, and that scale obviously took. H and R block's been around 70 years. It, uh, took a long time to build. And that's not something you walk away from. That's actually something you accentuate and you figure out how do we make that? The value, the real value of working with H, AH&R block, along with awesome, consistent digital experiences, always on access to answers, um, you know, product recommendations and the ability to better understand my tax situation, um, all of those things that we can deliver with technology. But then there's a human there, um, and I, and that human, by the way, lives in my hometown. Um, this isn't some, um, person.

Speaker B: I might run into them at the grocery store.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. That's right. And that's the power of like, local nature of the tax pros in communities is something that we, I think as a brand, we don't get enough credit for because we are this big national brand. But the people who are working for us are members of the community, serving other humans in their community. Right. So, um, we just need to do a better job figuring out how we make that connection, um, with customers around

Speaker B: the country us in a slightly different direction. I think this is really good. I think the value proposition, the way that your team is thinking about this, to the customer, to the market, to serve your existing group and maybe even kind of, uh, think creatively about how to serve the next customers coming in. Right. As Things are changing the way that they're searching, the way that they're understanding. Let's go back a little bit to in house. You have, you have a number of different products that you're managing across, you know, a lot of different service offerings. Because at the end of the day, Itchener Block is a service company that is heavily product enabled as a technology. I mean you can argue, are you a tech company or are you a service company? And uh, I would. My personal perspective, you may, you may reframe this for me, is that you're a service company that is like one of the most technologically advanced service companies out there. As you're thinking about your in house technology teams, a lot of the folks that listen to the podcast are folks that are on tech teams. They're on product teams. They're thinking about how can they be. Maybe they like your narrative of I want. Yeah, I'd love a localization. I'd love to be thinking about how I can build product that both serves my, my service providers and also serves my customer in a unique way, but drives back to human connection. How are you as a team? Are there principles, are there things that you're thinking about as you're working on your products that um, allow you to do that more effectively, to allow you to do that better, where you can hear the customer a little bit better, or you can get to the value propositions, or you're able to see around the corner a little further? What principles are driving you as a team that maybe help you to do that really well?

Speaker A: Yeah, there are. We came up with a experience measurement framework, uh, which sounds like a very cold way of saying it, um, but uh, it's all about for us making it easy. So it's ease, empathy, expertise are really the three things that we look to drive. And as a result expectations sort of becomes this catch all. Like we meet customers expectations and provide value for the, for the cost of our service. But we really do that through is it easy? Did we care about our customer? Did we show empathy in the experience? And um, did we deliver expertise? Because that's ultimately what people come to us for. When we started to analyze why people churn, um, why they don't convert and we analyze all of the data things that, that, that our customers and our prospects who left us said they were all around, it was hard. My tax pro didn't care about me. It was confusing. Uh, my tax pro didn't give me any advice, uh, or I didn't get any advice or uh, a Way, a path forward to make my tax situation or my financial situation better. So we really focus on those principles in our experience. And you can take it down to what's important to somebody in, you know, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I am, or Kansas City, or, you know, Dubuque, uh, Iowa, wherever they are. And, you know, if to that customer the local is important and being able to go in and meet somebody face to face, then how do you enable that to become a really easy experience with technology and deliver consistently? How do you show empathy or build a relationship with that customer using technology or using, you know, uh, the human connection? And then how do we just more consistently deliver expertise in everything that we do? Because that's why people are paying us money, because they expect us to deliver that expertise and that advice. So it's really around ease, empathy and expertise.

Speaker B: I love that framing. I'm curious then, how do you, in a truly practical way, how do your product teams get closer to that? Meaning there is, I mean, there's almost a geographical distance between how. I don't know how I would check in with people in Milwaukee. How do you see your teams finding creative ways to go? Actually, I know that I can maybe even, uh, build a relationship with one of my tax pros in that area, or I can test with them, or, hey, I'm going to actually prototype something and put it in front of them. How are you thinking about the way that you test these ideas about achieving those kind of three pillars with your product teams? You know, looking at the. The ways to test out ideas within the fact that you have such a broad marketplace?

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, we've got pilots running in all regions of the country with different technologies, different experience. It does require some travel because you do want to go into the offices where those pilots are taking place. Yeah. You want to talk to the humans that are experiencing them, whether it be the tax pros or clients coming into the office. So we do a lot of that, um, technology, uh, teams has been a huge help. We can jump on a quick video call and talk to a field leader or tax pros in a region and get direct feedback. I don't love surveys, but we do surveys, uh, to get local feedback.

Speaker B: I have mixed feelings about surveys, too. I just built a survey tool, and I even have mixed feelings about the fact that I built a survey tool. Yeah, I get it. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, when I, When I got here, just as a little bit of a sidebar, surveys were the way that the teams were figuring out what to do next. Right. Um, let's look at what are saying the most and go fix all that problem. Which it can be a surveys that can be a good tool as a, as a dig spot to go figure out what you should do. But it shouldn't be the only tool we're using. So we've gotten much better about, okay, we'll survey. But that's going to be one of many ways that we determine items on our roadmap. But you know, when we get down to, you know, what's going to resonate in uh, an office in New York City versus in a rural area in Montana, like you do have to really think about the people in those areas and we'd leverage. We've got franchisees and field leaders all over the country and when we're thinking about those experiences, it's really important to bring their voices in and understand uh, what the pain points are, what their client base is feeling and thinking and what's important to them. So we do a lot of analysis, uh, I would say regional or local analysis, uh, that can really inform at least the start of our hypotheses that we want to then go test.

Speaker B: Um, we do a lot of work in construction engineering, which tends to have this kind of same model where they have to be on ground at different places and they have offices and team

Speaker A: all over the place.

Speaker B: Um, one of the things that they see, and I'm curious, and this is not a, I don't think there's a right or wrong here. There's actually challenges with doing this. There's a really popularized thing in the last two years, but it's been amplified with AI because you can buy code stuff is quote unquote, citizen development. Right. It's this idea that like your workforce can actually kind of build their own little things to try out and bring back up to the, you know, the central office. Do you see that kind of activity happening or do you see your, you know, your tax pros trying to vibe something up? Or that people are trying to play with the technologies to, to prototype ideas and then bring them back to you. Or most of the time they're like, hey, you know what? These are financial folks. They just want to know that the technology is going to get them, uh, you know, talking to the right client.

Speaker A: The first thing I'd say is I don't think. And I, I don't think there's any bad place an idea can come from.

Speaker B: Love that.

Speaker A: So we want to hear from our franchisees, we want to hear from our folks in the field, um, when they have ideas. We haven't had a situation that I'm aware of that they've gone off and Vibe coded. Uh, that's fair.

Speaker B: I'm not suggesting they should. You may not want that.

Speaker A: So the thing that. The thing that we are trying to bring is a consistently awesome experience. And so we're trying to bring consistency to it. So we. We get a lot of ideas and feedback, um, from our franchisee network, uh, our field leaders. But, you know, we take that as part of, like, one of many inputs into deciding either what do we pilot or what do we want to move forward with our roadmap. Um, but, yeah, we don't have teams. Um, now I have a very decentralized team. I. About half my team sits in Kansas City, half of them are spread out all over the country. So, yeah, the nature of that, we do have regional sort of experiences sort of flowing into the overall, um, you know, as we go through design reviews or, uh, roadmap reviews. Like, there is, uh, some level of, you know, sort of localness to all of these different areas coming into, um, into those experiences. But, um, but yeah, we don't have a situation where we've got our field leaders going off and trying to develop, um, experiences from a technical perspective.

Speaker B: If I've got a field leader listening right now, I'm not suggesting you go start sending Vibe coding tools up to. To Mike. Um, okay. I want to turn it real quick, just to kind of wrap us. Something that I'm thinking about is you've. You've painted a really beautiful picture of where technology and AI should be driving and what your. Your intent here. What I hear you saying is your intent is that technology, AI Insights drives you back to ultimately a human connection that has that per. That expertise and that trust that can deliver what HR Block has always delivered. But. So this is the kind of. Yes, that's great. In a utopia, everything works perfectly. Um, where are there areas that you see people just, like, either going rogue or they're really struggling to get that right, or they have a different. A missed expectation for what either technology was supposed to do or how far it was supposed to go, or maybe what the Tax Pro was supposed to step in earlier? Um, as things are changing so fast, where do you see some of the missteps or challenges that you're having to jump over hurdles to get right?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, our. I've talked a lot about the importance of the human connection and the importance of our Tax Pro within the experience, uh, for. For our customers and clients, um, bringing Consistency across that entire network and delivering it with quality has, is a hurdle. Um, you know, we've got. Many of our experts have been doing this for, you know, years or decades. I think the average 10 years, 10, 11 years, um, which means we've got. That have been doing this 25, 30 years. Um, and they have a process and they've got clients who have a level of expectation that this is what the process is, and I'm comfortable with that. How do you balance, um, that sort of legacy experience and expectation for these clients who have been amazing clients for us, and these tax pros who are awesome at delivering a great experience for their clients with an evolving digital experience and trying to incorporate consistency in how we come to life digitally while trying to drive up, uh, more consistency with the awesome humans that are serving people in our offices. Because those processes need to naturally change as the technology changes, as we try to get, uh, maybe a better view of, uh, our customers so that we can do a better job of providing them recommendations and advice through technology. Um, so it's really sort of bridging the gap between this legacy experience that has worked really well for decades with new technologies, uh, that are going to be more attractive to newer customers and younger folks that are just used to having awesome experiences on their phone versus having to walk into an office to get that experience.

Speaker B: Yeah, I forget that your marketplace is literally, potentially every human being over the age of, I don't know when you had to start filing taxes. 16, 18, or maybe younger, I don't know. In the US I assume you're mostly serving us. That brings up every single variance of technical comfortability, trust issues, um, tenure. Like you said, they've been doing it the same way for 30 years. I don't want to change it. I just, I know Jim. He takes care of me every year until when he retires, I, I retire and I just won't do my taxes afterwards. You know that like. So, uh, hopefully that's not the case. Um, yeah. Right, right. No, um, yeah, that, that is a. That's a unique challenge. That's a unique challenge. Um, an exciting one. Right? That's a. It's an interesting problem to solve is you've got a generation you're still dealing with a generation that literally did not grow up with technology and a generation that is only known the world as technology at the same time.

Speaker A: That's right. And dealing with a very stressful moment. And for most of our clients, it's going to be the biggest financial transaction of the year. Every single year. And you can't get that wrong. And you need to maintain a level of confidence that we are both getting it right, but that we're there to support them and help them live better financial lives. And uh, so it's a pretty, ah, you know, lofty task that we've got and how do we deliver a consistently and consistent and easy experience, um, so that it just makes sense to start, uh, incorporating some of these into, for those clients that have been with us for 30 years, you know, we have to make that a really easy experience. We can't make them jump through hoops because we want them to do a new thing, um, the same thing for our tax pros. We can't make them jump through hoops to do the same thing they were already doing. Um, that seemed so much easier to them because, uh, we just want them to use a new technology.

Speaker B: I really appreciate, I mean I'm a little biased, right, because H and R Block's headquarters is in our back backyard. But I really appreciate everyone that I've ever known that's been on the team on the, either the design side of the technology side there at Block. I think I've been really impressed with their. What you're talking about here, about really achieving that human value and trust is whatever you're putting in the water over there, they're all drinking it. It's, it is very much a place that has an ethos, a culture of caring deeply about your client and your customer. And I think that it plays out in the way that you think about designing and building products and technology to serve them, um, or your tax pros, right? I mean both. I mean you've kind of got that two sided marketplace where you're trying to serve both. And now as you're offering these new services throughout the year, you're just constantly looking for like, how can we help? How can we bring more value to you with the resources and the technology and the capabilities that we have at our disposal? And I think so. I guess I would just say thank you. Thank you for being a part of an intentional team. There's not a, you know, not every company is intentionally thinking about, um, how they can help humans better, uh, with the technology they're building.

Speaker A: Well, I really appreciate you saying that. And it's, it struck me from the moment I joined H and R Block, it. That's, that is the culture of the company. There is a true level of commitment to caring about one another within, uh, the corporate headquarters, through the field. Um, and then of course our tax pros who serve our clients. They care deeply about the people that they serve. Uh, and that comes through in every meeting, every conversation. Uh, and, yeah. So I appreciate that you recognize that and that you sent that.

Speaker B: It's real. Okay. Well, Mike, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Where can we learn about, uh, you or H and R Block?

Speaker A: Uh, you can Certainly, uh, visit hrblock.com, set, uh, up your tax appointment, and, uh, would be, uh, more than happy to, um, connect with, uh, with you again and talk more about awesome experiences that we're delivering.

Speaker B: Well, Mike, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. This is great.

Speaker A: All right, thanks, George. Thanks.