At one startup, I started an initiative where every person in the organization would spend a day a month answering customer support emails. We were a small team at the time and always constrained on resources. One of our senior engineers, one of the best I’ve ever worked with, was highly opposed to the initiative. “Paritosh”, he said, “our small engineering team will spend 5% of their work time now doing customer support. This is going to significantly push back our product delivery goals. It doesn’t make sense.” I said we’ll take the hit and let’s do it anyway.
On his customer support day, I saw him sitting sullenly in the morning answering support emails. Many of the support issues were due to people ‘using our product incorrectly’, ‘not knowing how our product works’ or doing ‘unexpected things’. He knew the product inside out. His frustration was palpable. “Our customers are so stupid!”.
However, something changed as he kept reading these issues:
“We can actually change this flow to work differently – that’ll make it clearer for customers.”
“Ah, I can see why they’re expecting something else to happen. I can fix this quickly.”
“Oh, that’s not right. I should put that on our bugs list.”
He started understanding why I wanted everyone to do support. You can be the smartest, most experienced product builder and you will still be surprised by how customers use your product and where the gaps are. The only solution is to directly observe and interact with them – talk to them, do user testing, answer their support issues.
P.S. – I can’t confirm this, but I think after that day I saw him secretly open our customer support emails during breaks to review the issues they were facing.