The Product Team and the Escalation Team Should Be Best Friends
Support knows first. Why the signal dies three times on its way upstream, and the cheapest repair I know.
The worst cases in the company came to my teams. The billing error that found its way to a reporter. The outage with a regulator already asking questions. The complaint that arrived with a lawyer attached. I ran the queues where customer problems became company problems, and my people were the interface to everyone who could actually fix things: engineering, Legal, PR, compliance.
Here is what that seat teaches you. Support knows first.
When customers started cutting the cord, they did not announce it in a survey. They told my agents, in plain language, on recorded lines, years before the trend had a name on an earnings call. Every product defect, every pricing mistake, every process that quietly burned trust arrived at the edge of the company long before it arrived anywhere else. The most verified account of how the product actually failed sat in the queue, told by the people living it, in their own words.
And almost none of it became a decision.
I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this essay blames someone. The executives who would not listen. The finance team and their metrics. Nobody needs that essay, and it would not be true. The honest version is that the signal died of natural causes, three separate times, on its way upstream.
The first break: we deleted the evidence at the source.
Support was a cost center, so support was measured on cost. Contacts per customer. Cost per contact. Deflection rate. For a decade the industry celebrated every contact that never happened. And here I owe my old teams some precision, because we were not managing to those numbers blindly. We ran root cause analysis on the worst patterns as a matter of routine. We packaged what we were seeing and shared it across the business, with any team that would take the meeting. (Most did. Attendance was never the problem.) That awareness work was constant and it was real. But the operating model paid for deflection anyway, and every contact we deflected was a data point destroyed. The customer with the confusing bill, the one who could not make the feature work, the one calling for the third time about the same thing. Those were the exact contacts carrying the intelligence, and we built programs to make them go away.
Part of why the cost center label stuck is that the queue’s real value was invisible. My teams caught complaint patterns before they became regulatory filings. We caught defects before they landed on Legal’s desk. But an avoided fine never shows up on a P&L. So the only number anyone could see was the cost, and organizations manage what they can see.
The second break: we compressed whatever survived.
Even the contacts that happened were recorded, sampled, and scored on how the agent behaved rather than on what the customer said. I traded notes on this earlier in the week with Gerti Haxhiu, who runs contact center operations for a living and sees this from the provider side. His description was sharper than mine. Every call recorded, a couple percent sampled, the sample graded on agent performance. By the time anything reached the rooms where decisions got made, it had been compressed into a handle time and a satisfaction score. And as he put it, nobody kills a cash cow over a CSAT number.
That sentence explains a lot of corporate history. The rooms deciding whether to disrupt a profitable business almost never heard the customers describing their exits. They heard a green dashboard, and now and then a root cause read-out that everyone agreed was concerning before the agenda moved on. The choice they were actually making never appeared on a slide.
The third break: whatever survived was orphaned.
The sliver of signal that made it upstream arrived in rooms where nobody owned acting on it. I lived this one most directly, because moving signals across organizational boundaries was my actual job, and it was the hardest part of the job by a wide margin. Our root cause findings were often in the deck. People nodded. Nobody disputed them. Then the meeting ended and the finding belonged to no one. The escalation team could see the problem and could not own the fix. The product team could own the fix and could not see the problem. Between them sat a boundary, and the org chart did not assign anyone to carry things across it.
So the carrying got done by habit and by relationship, where it got done at all. One of our most senior executives had a habit I have thought about ever since. Every escalation that landed in his inbox went back out with the adjacent owners copied on it. My teams would solve the case and close it regardless. He was not asking anyone to fix anything. He wanted the owners to know what their corner of the business was doing to customers, every single time. Some just read them. The good ones got involved.
Which brings me to the title.
The best product decisions I ever watched happen did not start in a review meeting. They started with an engineer sitting next to an escalation rep for an afternoon, wearing a headset, listening. Not reading a summary. Listening. Something changes in a builder who hears a customer struggle with their work in real time. The roadmap conversation is different afterward, and it stays different.
And the owned path is not hypothetical, because we built one. A quiet team of five people whose entire job was carrying social and escalation trends directly to the product and engineering teams, delivered weekly, for each product. Nobody handed us that lane. We created it, because the bridge the org chart would not draw still needed to exist.
If I ran a product organization today, I would start there and go further. Engineers on the listening side of the queue on a regular rotation, hours not minutes. A named, standing seat for the escalation team in roadmap reviews, with airtime that does not depend on the month’s crisis. One owned path for verified failure evidence, a specific person who receives it and decides where it goes. And that evidence reported with the same rigor the company applies to revenue, because it is the same kind of information. It tells you where the money is going to stop.
This is on my mind because every company is right now deciding what AI does to its support organization. The market is finally waking up to the queue as an intelligence asset, and mostly waking up in one direction: revenue. New platforms mine support interactions for training opportunities, services engagements, expansion signals. The direction is right, and some of it is genuinely well built. Kahuna Labs launched a module this week that puts a human review step between the pattern and the routing, which is the right instinct. Revenue is the first version of this signal a CFO can see, so revenue is where the category started. That is fair.
But look at where these signals route. Sales. Success. Services. The fix direction still has no owner. Product is still not in the room. And there is a fragile property worth protecting along the way. The queue’s evidence is honest for one reason only: customers tell support the truth because they believe they are talking to help. Point the queue at upsell clumsily and the truth dries up. The asset everyone suddenly wants to mine exists because of trust, and trust does not survive being farmed.
If AI in support gets aimed only at deflection and expansion, we will rebuild the old blindness with better technology. Automate the handling. Keep the listening. And route what you hear to the people who can remove the cause, not just the people who can monetize the symptom.
The chain breaks three times. The edge hears it. The measurement compresses it. Whatever survives lands in a room where nobody owns acting on it. Nobody can fix that whole chain in a quarter. But the third break has the cheapest repair I know of, and it is two teams and a standing invitation.
The escalation team is holding the truest record in the company of how the product fails. The product team is the only group that can make that record matter. Introduce them, and then protect the friendship like it is infrastructure, because it is.
No blame, just physics.
Justin
P.S. The two in the header have never once disputed who owns a signal.