During a This Week in Testing, Ben Dowen (@fullsnacktester) and a few others discussed how we can learn from liaising directly with our customer support teams. They make for amazing oracles and heuristics to spark test ideas and identify gaps in our testing approach and the risks we are testing for.
Connecting to our customers via a customer support team is certainly one way for us to learn. Ben also highlighted teams he’s worked with where developers were in direct contact with customers.
He made a point that the way a product gets to production can make a difference in how we learn about that product from our customers.
So how about we gather a list of the many ways we can connect with customers? How does it work where you’re currently working and in other places? What other ways could there be to connect with your customers? How have those channels helped (and hindered)?
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I threw a few ideas together, most of which I’ve used, and some of these may be applicable:
- Talk to the customers
- Talk to anyone who talks to customers
- Support
- Management
- Product owners
- Talk to other people who need to understand customers
- Sales people
- Designers
- Product owners
- Get access to systems that customers directly interact with
- Customer-raised bug reports
- The support system
- Feedback forms
- Get access to systems that customer indirectly interact with
- Empathy
- How you’d react as a person to your own product
- Your history with similar products
- Your experiences with software in general
- Predicting the normal pressures of life
- How someone may come to misuse a product
It’s really worth understanding what you’re looking for too. Perhaps you’re looking to see what customers are eager to buy, or what their shared values tend to be, or where their intent for the software changes compared to other customers, and so on.
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