Part One: Strategy · The stance of the business
Summaries and dashboards let a few people speak for many customers. The people who decide what to build stop hearing a customer's own words.
Summaries are comfortable. A chart of sessions, a list of top requests, a paragraph from whoever spoke to customers last. They arrive on time, they fit on a page, and nobody in them is annoyed with you. A conversation with a customer takes an hour and might be awkward.
What a summary leaves out is everything that would have told you what to do. "People find setup confusing." Which screen? What were they trying to do? What did they say, exactly, when it went wrong?
A summary also does not sting. Watching one person fail to find the button you designed changes what you do that afternoon. Reading that a share of sessions end at step three does not.
Summaries are still needed, because one conversation is one conversation, and the people who write in are not typical. The two check each other. The summary says where to look. The contact shows what is there.
In a company, the people who answer customers every day know them best. Makers should work beside them: sit with support for an hour, join a call a customer success colleague was already going to make, ask which three customers are worth a visit. This takes time away from building, and whoever plans the team's hours will feel it.
Paul English, a co-founder of the travel site Kayak, kept a loud red telephone in the office that rang with customer calls. He answered it himself, and expected the engineers to answer it too. The people who could fix a problem heard it from the person who had it.
Therefore:
Whoever decides what to build, or builds it, should hear customers firsthand on a regular schedule, with a question in mind. Use summaries to choose where to look, and contact to see what is there.
In practice. This week, sit beside whoever answers customers for an hour, or take one call yourself. Bring one question the last report left open, and write down the answer in the customer's words.
Goes with. Contact teaches you THEIR WORDS, NOT YOURS (10). It is how you hear about THE LAST TIME THEY SWITCHED (19), and at the scale of a single screen it becomes WATCH SOMEONE USE IT (59).