This is a talk I came across from Kevin Hale, founder of Wufoo, about a talk he gave to UserConf 2012.

Kevin is big on making everyone at the company do support, and how that informs what he calls “support-driven development.” When everyone has to answer customer emails, they’re more invested in improving the product for the people who pay for and use it.

That’s how we do it here at The Interviewr as well, providing support to our customers is a big part of what we do, and we make it work by having everyone involved.

We use the awesome help desk software at zendesk.com for our tickets, and from there, as tickets come in, we answer them on a first-come, first-take-care-of basis. So who ever grabs the ticket first, takes care of it.

We also keep an internal field guide that contains most common answers that come in, as well as who to contact about what. This  works well for keeping track of how different things work, like how our calling system works. We’ve taken pain-staking care to make sure all our processes are documented in our field guide and no stone has been left unturned.

Obviously, putting everybody in direct contact with customers isn’t about putting out fires, it’s about keeping fires from happening. It’s about having the kinds of conversations that lead to better products in the first place. Many of our features have come from talking with customers.

And we’re not the only company that does this, plenty of successful companies (Amazon, Olark, Zappos, Automattic) train every employee to work one-on one with customers.

Paul English, CEO of Kayak, told Inc. Magazine:

The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I’m smoking crack. They say, “Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?”

If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.

And that’s the rub, building a better product, building someone people love. And the best way to do that is to talk to people. Having designers and developers involved in talking to people will help them see what people want.

We’re heavily in the middle of our next major update, and people will love what they see, and a good chunk of it has come from talking to people and seeing what they want.