Honest Feedback Isn't Scheduled: Why Support Calls Reveal What Research Sessions Can't
Finding candid user feedback is harder than it should be. After years of experimentation, I've discovered something that now seems obvious: the most valuable user insights come not from formal research sessions but from the trenches of customer support.
Most companies create artificial barriers between those who build products and those who support them. This is a mistake. The people taking calls from frustrated users possess a treasure trove of insights that formal research sessions can never match.
The Manufactured Reality of Most Formal User Research
When I was a product designer, our user research often felt like a performance. We'd create elaborate research plans, secure approvals, recruit participants, and finally conduct sessions in controlled environments. By the time users reached us, they'd been filtered and prepped to the point where authentic reactions were rare.
These participants treated sessions like exams they needed to pass. They'd demonstrate their intelligence by theorizing about how things "should" work rather than admitting confusion. Acknowledging difficulty with a product felt like admitting personal failure, so they'd deflect: "Other people might struggle with this, but not me."
This isn't to dismiss all formal research. Well-executed contextual inquiries and ethnographic studies can yield powerful insights. But these approaches require significant time and resources, and even then, participants remain aware they're being studied.
The Accidental Ethnographer
I discovered a better approach by accident. After graduating with an industrial design degree, I took a customer support job at a small TV box service while working on a startup. Ten to fifteen agents handled thousands of customers.
After a month, I knew every product issue inside and out. To make my job easier, I began experimenting with different approaches. What I didn't realize: I was accumulating my 10,000 hours in user research immediately after finishing a design degree that supposedly taught me how to understand users.
The phone-only nature of the job created unique challenges. Without seeing what customers saw, every interaction became a detective story. One elderly customer claimed their box showed "a vase with beautiful flowers." Through careful questioning, we discovered they were describing physical objects sitting on their powered-off television.
This wasn't staged research. These were real people with real problems who needed immediate solutions.
Why Customer Support Insights Are Superior
Customer support interactions provide three things formal research can't:
- Unvarnished reactions: Users aren't performing; they're trying to solve problems that matter enough to make them pick up the phone.
- Natural context: You encounter users in their actual environments, not artificial settings.
- Volume and variety: Instead of small sample sizes of hand-picked participants, you get thousands of interactions across your entire user base.
The most honest feedback comes when people aren't aware they're providing feedback. The frustration, confusion, and occasional delight expressed during support calls are genuine human reactions, not performance art.
Your Best Recruitment Channel
The traditional user recruitment process is broken. Companies hire agencies to find "representative users," who often turn out to be professional study participants more interested in the incentive than your product.
What if your most valuable research participants are already calling you?
Support interactions identify users who care enough about your product to reach out when something's wrong. These people have skin in the game. They're not participating for a gift card; they're participating because your product matters in their lives.
When a user calls with a problem and receives exceptional help, something magical happens: gratitude creates openness. This moment—when frustration transforms into relief—is your recruitment opportunity.
After resolving their issue, a simple question can convert them from one-time research participants into long-term insight partners: "We're always looking to improve our product. Would you be willing to speak with our design team occasionally about your experiences?"
These recruits are superior in every way:
- They're actual users with authentic use cases
- They've demonstrated investment in your product's success
- They've experienced both pain points and resolution
- They feel a connection to your company through the positive support experience
Most importantly, they haven't been primed to "perform" as research participants. They're just users who want a better product.
The AI Revolution in Support and Research
As AI increasingly handles routine customer support inquiries, we face both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge: potentially losing the human connection that makes support interactions so valuable for insight gathering. The opportunity: liberating support agents to focus on complex issues and deeper user understanding.
AI will inevitably handle the repetitive, straightforward support cases. What remains for humans will be the nuanced, complex, and emotionally charged interactions—precisely the situations that yield the richest user insights.
This shift creates a new possibility: support agents evolving from transaction processors to insight gatherers. As AI handles the routine, human agents can be retrained to recognize patterns, probe deeper, and capture the qualitative understanding that algorithms miss.
The future support agent won't just solve problems; they'll be trained to uncover the mental models, expectations, and unstated needs that led to those problems. This transformation makes them even more valuable as researchers.
How to Implement This Approach (Even at Scale)
The pushback is predictable: "We can't have expensive product designers answering support tickets all day." And you're right—you can't. But that's not what I'm suggesting. Here's how to implement this approach efficiently:
- Rotational immersion, not permanent reassignment. Have product team members spend one day per quarter in support. Just eight hours every three months is enough to maintain empathy and understanding without disrupting their primary work.
- Shadow sessions over support shifts. Instead of handling tickets directly, designers can listen in on calls or review ticket transcripts for an hour each week. This scales well even in large organizations.
- Create a "support insights council." Appoint exceptional support agents as part-time research liaisons who meet with product teams bi-weekly to share patterns and recruit promising users for deeper research.
- Build support→research tooling. Create simple ways for agents to flag interactions with research potential and capture key insights without disrupting their workflow.
- Maintain ongoing relationships rather than one-off sessions. The same users can provide insights across the product lifecycle, creating continuity in your understanding.
These approaches work whether you have ten employees or ten thousand. The key is creating structured touchpoints between those who hear from users daily and those who design for them.
The End of Artificial Barriers
The separation between "supporting the product" and "researching the product" is artificial and counterproductive. The people who spend all day helping users navigate your product's shortcomings are your most valuable researchers. They just haven't been given the title or the authority.
As AI transforms customer support, we have an opportunity to recognize this reality and reshape both fields for the better. The best customer support agents already think like researchers; they just need permission to act like them.
The most effective user research doesn't happen in labs or scheduled sessions. It happens every day on support lines, where real users with real problems tell you exactly what's wrong with your product.
How much valuable feedback is your company ignoring right now? How many perfect research candidates hang up the phone after their issue is resolved, never to be heard from again? The insights that could transform your product are already flowing through your support channels. The only question is whether you're listening.