# Support is product research with angry participants
Understanding · diagnostic · https://build-here.africa/book/chapters/04-03-support-is-product-research-with-angry-participants.html

## The symptom

Support resolves requests and tracks response times. The difficulties that come back every week never reach the decisions about the product.

## The signal

Every support request is a user who took the time to tell you what does not work. It is the cheapest research you will ever get.

## What's going on

Someone who writes to support made an effort to get help. Answer them first. After that, their message is data: what they were trying to do, where they got stuck, in their own words.

Several people ask where to download an invoice. The button may be badly placed. Or access is missing, or the invoice was never produced, or the word is misunderstood. Grouping the requests shows you where to look. The cause, you still have to go and check.

The most frequent reason is not always the most serious. Look at who is affected too, and at what happens to the people who never write in. Support knows that context: bring it along with the messages.

An AI can sort a week of requests in minutes. Use it to find the patterns, then read ten messages from each one yourself. The numbers tell you where to look, the messages tell you what to fix.

## Check this

With support, take the week's requests. Note the problem described, one possible cause, and how to check it. Do not mistake the label for the diagnosis.

Fix one cause. At the next check-in, see whether that reason goes down, relative to the number of users.

Then keep one hour a week to read support.

## To discuss

Which reason comes back to support every week without anyone having checked its cause?