Your support team can be an extremely valuable resource when it comes to customer insights.

I’m actually a big fan of pairing, at least one person from support with each product team, whenever they’re working on a new feature. Doing so seems to help bridge the gap between support and product.

If this isn’t something that your company has ever tried, you may find that you face resistance to the idea. Support tends to get hit up regularly in my experience, to help with an assortment of things that take them away from their primary job, which is helping customers. So support tends to get really good at saying, “No” to things outside of the scope of their primary job.

If this is the case, just propose a trial experiment.

Start by placing a specific time box around it. Like no more than three hours per week.

Then attempt to measure the experiment, at least qualitatively.

How did they feel about being deeply involved in the product development process? What insights did they bring to the table as a result of being deeply embedded? How did they spend their time? Was the three hours per week a good return on investment?

In my experience, it always is.