What a week shadowing support taught our researchers

Every summer, our researchers spend a week inside the customer success team: reading the queue, joining calls, writing replies with a teammate checking each one. It is the most humbling week of the year, and the most useful.

Three assumptions we dropped

1. 1That tickets are mostly bugs. Most were people unsure whether they had done something right.
2. 2That customers read release notes. They learn about features when something changes on screen.
3. 3That “quick question” emails are low value. They were the clearest descriptions of real workflows we saw all week.

Habits we kept

• A shared tag for “confidence” problems — users who succeed but don’t believe they did.
• A standing fifteen-minute slot each week where support plays one clip to the product team.
• Writing highlight notes the way support writes replies: short, kind and specific.

What changed in the product

The “confidence” tag became one of the busiest in our own workspace within a month. It led directly to clearer confirmation states after imports and a short summary at the end of each synthesis session — small changes that came from watching people succeed and still write in to ask whether they had.

Try it yourself

You don’t need a full week. Two afternoons reading the queue, with a support lead explaining context, will surface more research questions than a planning workshop. Bring a notebook and leave the solutions at the door.