How Taxfix Retains Mobile App Users With Targeted NPS Surveys

“Retention is king” - but what does it mean? 

For Krzysztof, Head of CRM at Taxfix, it means being relevant—sharing the right content, asking the right questions, and being at the right touch points at the right time. 

It may sound like a sweet little fantasy for all companies struggling with a data-driven approach, but Taxfix’s example shows it works and really pays off.

And we mean it. With a Net Promoter Score of 68 and an 88% completion rate, this may be the story to inspire. 

But let’s start from the beginning.

About Taxfix

Taxfix is Germany’s most popular tax app, designed with the idea that “doing taxes should be easier.” The company’s mission is to help people get their money, or tax refund, back. 

“What started as a simple do-it-yourself solution that allows you to do your taxes on your mobile phone within 30 minutes has now grown to a multiproduct and multimarket business.”

Krzysztof Szymański, Head of CRM at Taxfix

Taxfix makes doing your taxes easy and less stressful by guiding you through the process and ensuring you claim all the deductions and credits you're eligible for. So, instead of dealing with complicated tax forms, you can use Taxfix to simplify the process and potentially get more money back on your tax return.

Mobile vs. web app usage

Interestingly, around 75% of Taxfix customers use the mobile application to do their taxes. Krzysztof Szymański admits,

“I was surprised when I found out. When I joined Taxfix, I actually thought there were still significantly more people who would rather do it on their desktop. That's not the case. So only every fourth customer uses Taxfix on Web.”

“What's crucial for us at Taxfix is that you come back.” 

The main challenge for Krzysztof is retention. What’s important to underline is that seasonality is a crucial factor for Taxfix because people tend to focus on doing their taxes primarily in the first quarter of the year and around the deadline.

Taxifix is conscious it doesn’t have much time to build rapport with its users, so it has to be dead accurate in communicating with users. 

Relevancy: the key to users’ trust

Taxfix wants to be sure it helps the customers the right way. Relevancy is one of the biggest goals for Krzysztof and his colleagues.

Krzysztof admits that using product data for this purpose can make sense in particular cases. Still, he believes that understanding customers through their personal feedback sets Taxfix apart in the quest to win users’ trust in the product. 

That’s why Taxfix decided to create various versions of its user journey based on the audience segmentation built with first-hand user insights from Survicate surveys. 

So, how does Taxfix do that?

Measuring NPS in the mobile app

The primary source of user insights for Taxfix are the NPS surveys triggered by specific events in the user journey. For its do-it-yourself product, Taxfix measures the NPS twice—after a user files their tax declaration and after the tax office makes a tax refund.

But why do they measure it twice for one process?—you may ask yourself. Well, the first survey collects information about the overall experience with the process, whether it was easy, quick, etc. 

The second survey is sent after the tax office makes the decision about the refund, a few weeks after a user files the declaration. And there might be differences between the refund calculated by the app and what the user receives. It usually happens due to users trying their luck and filing non-refundable expenses. Since the difference in the refund amount might affect the overall sentiments toward the app, Taxfix measures NPS again at this stage. 

Precise audience targeting

Besides collecting the NPS, Taxfix asks its users some more questions. “We already have their attention—why not try to get something else?” Krzysztof asks rhetorically. 

With Surivcate, even partial responses are saved, so the first NPS question will be there even if the users don’t take the whole survey.

“We ask three questions that help us classify our users and put them into one of our targeting groups. And then that information is also saved in Braze, our CRM tool, and the team uses that for content personalization,”

Krzysztof explains.

The company understands that different people may have different sentiments toward doing taxes and the way they approach this task. That’s why they divided them into various categories to personalize the content they receive.

NPS segmentation

The first is the classic NPS segmentation into promoters, passives, and detractors.

“What's the likelihood of someone who gave us a very low score to refer us to their friend? Probably low. And then, at the same time, there’s no relevancy. If someone gives us a score of one and the next message they get is like, ‘Hey, refer us to their friend,’ as a customer, I would feel like, okay, these guys have no idea what they are doing.”

Sentiment toward doing taxes

Are you the person that feels like the gates of hell open when you just hear about doing taxes? You’d probably fall into Taxfix’s “cautious filer” group if you are. These individuals are not keen on doing taxes at all—quite the opposite: they are afraid of the whole concept but still would like to get their money back. That’s why they would like to have it done for them and be sure the tax office doesn’t call with any issues. 

The other group is the “optimizers”—basically, the opposite of cautious filers. They understand taxes and are not afraid of them. 

“If you think from the CRM perspective, which I represent, if you think about the type of content, the type of updates, the type of messages they would require, it's very different,”

Krzysztof points out. 

Filing time

After carefully observing its users, the company noticed there are specific peaks for filing declarations and added this factor as another profiling element. Again, these different user profiles cannot get the same kind of messages. As Krzysztof puts it

“If I know that for the last three years, you've always been filing a few days before the deadline, the likelihood of me changing this behavior and forcing you to file in January is rather low.”

Mobile app setup

We already mentioned that Taxfix measures the NPS twice as an in-app survey. The post-filing survey shows up right after the filling process is finished in the mobile app.

The other survey, called “post-assessment NPS,” gets triggered after the tax office takes care of the user’s case between a couple of weeks and three months later. It means the user is no longer actively using the product. 

Bringing people back to the product is more complicated. That’s why Krzysztof decided to increase efforts to capture as many users as possible.

“To do that, we use almost all available channels. We don't send letters with NPS yet, but maybe we'll get there one day,” he laughs. 

Currently, Taxfix uses more standard methods, such as push notifications or emails. So the moment a user receives a push notification, tapping on it opens the product, and the survey is waiting there. For users who opted out from email and/or push notifications, the survey waits patiently in the product. This workflow gives Taxfix a 33% response rate to the NPS surveys and allows it to compare post-filing and post-assessment ratings.

Results

All these efforts are worthwhile. The NPS for the “do-it-yourself” product is 68, with an 88% completion rate of the post-filing survey. And while getting the customers back for the post-assessment NPS survey is much more tricky, the completion rate for the users that did come back is around 80%. 

A high completion rate is paramount to Taxfix, as it makes the NPS representative. “Imagine you have a completion rate of, let’s say, 5%—it just won’t be representative for the entire customer population,” Krzysztof explains.

“The R in CRM stands for a relationship”

Krzysztof has a clear vision of his goals at Taxfix: to build a lasting relationship with the customers based on trust and a personal approach. 

“I see my work purely as a long-term game. The R in CRM stands for a relationship, not for revenue. And I think many teams tend to forget about it. I don't believe you can achieve anything if you don't pay enough attention to relationship building.”

Importantly, it also refers to business partnerships. Taxfix has been with Survicate for over five years, and during this time, Survicate has been a vital tool to really get to know its customers—their customs, preferences, and sentiment toward doing taxes. 

“Having partners like Survicate is great. I'm very happy to see how the tool is developing, how you're innovating on your product, and how much attention you pay to your customers. I'm definitely satisfied with the level of support we're getting. That makes my life and my work significantly easier.”

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