Wednesday, June 15, 2022

A queue full of rocket-powered horses

Think inside the box

Henry Ford didn't actually say "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses," but it's true. People may well have asked for faster horses. What they probably wanted was to get to their destination more quickly and conveniently, ideally without the risk of being thrown from a height into a pile of...recently digested grass.

Truly new ideas rarely arrive in an Archimedean bath-leaping flash of inspiration¹. They are more likely to arise from long immersion in the chunky soup of research, customer interviews, experiments and knowledge borrowed from other fields.

So no, you don't have to just ask people what they want. You can read between the lines, and ask good follow up questions. Learn about people's lives and their jobs to be done, and interpret their comments in that context.

There is no guaranteed formula for inventing new products or even for making changes everyone will like, but your customer service inbox is an incredible source for the input you need to greatly increase your chance of success.

The trick is to recognize that input in its raw form, and to have a process for getting it into the right hands. If your support team is merely a buffer against problems, those insights will never make it through.

The truth is out there.

¹ "Despite what TV writers seem to think"

Mat Patterson
Help Scout

Turning support requests into customer insights

Your customer service team hears directly from customers who have specific questions but are also providing incredibly useful information. Here's how to collect that information and get it to the people who need it.