Don’t leave meaningful data on the table!

Don’t leave meaningful data on the table! Here are some ways you can leverage customer support teams and tickets to triangulate your business intelligence and inform your UX research.

NOTE: A support ticket catalogs the interaction between a customer and a service representative allowing your org to create, update, and hopefully resolve customer issues. A good support ticketing system allows the org to manage and maintain a list of common customer issues and questions.

A: Support teammates and tickets can be used to inform and help product development and applied research efforts in several capacities. For example:

1. Finding and speaking with the support person responsible for the area you researching can provide a wealth of information

2. Pulling tickets when trying to become more educated about a topic before and during research planning

3. Leveraging the lexicon customers use when looking to understand or explore nomenclature

4. Cross referring ticket topics with secondary resources like G2 crowd or social media to ascertain level or pain or priority

5. Pulling a list from the people who filed a ticket to target or expedite recruiting efforts

6. Benchmarking before and after ticket stats and content to measure design/comprehension and other improvements over time (impact)

7. Cross-referencing tickets to substantiate what was gathered through primary research

8. Extrapolating ticket verbatim to bolster research storytelling
   In what other ways can customer support tickets be leveraged?

9. Other suggestions? Please add them below!

TAKE AWAY: Get to know your support team! They are a wealth of knowledge and have similar goals to a user researcher!