What Getting Run Over by Air Conditioners Taught Me About Support Team Insights

By Matt Young, Co-Founder

Your support team has insights that could save your product. The problem is, they're not telling you. I learned this the hard way… and it nearly cost me more than a bicycle.

I was biking home in the bike lane when a black truck cut me off. I got angry. Locked in on the body of the truck blocking my path.

What I didn't see was the trailer full of air conditioning units swinging wide behind me.

Jacob was riding behind me. He saw everything. The truck, the trailer, the arc of several tons of HVAC equipment heading directly into my path. But he didn't yell out. Later, he told me why: "I thought you saw it. You seemed like you had it handled."

I did not have it handled.

By the time I noticed the trailer, it was too late. I bailed. The trailer crushed my bike.

Why Support Team Insights Never Reach Leadership

This exact scenario plays out in conference rooms every day.

A CEO pushes a new initiative. The support team sees the problems coming. The negative customer sentiment, the friction, the bugs. They have direct access to customer feedback that nobody else in the organization sees. But they stay quiet. They think:

"They must see it. They have the bigger picture."

They don't. Leadership often has less information than the front lines, not more. But the psychological gap makes speaking up feel impossible. What if you're wrong? What if they know something you don't?

So the trailer swings into the lane. And nobody says anything.

This is the disconnect that kills products. Your support team sits on a goldmine of customer support data that could drive your product roadmap, but organizational dynamics prevent that signal from reaching decision-makers.

"Speak Up" Doesn't Work

You can tell your team to speak up all you want. It won't work. The hierarchy is too strong. The self-doubt is too ingrained.

What works is removing the human from the equation. Not the insight. The delivery.

When your support data speaks for itself, when the sentiment drop shows up in a dashboard before anyone has to raise their hand, nobody has to be the messenger. The data is the messenger. And data doesn't worry about looking stupid in a meeting.

This is what modern support team insights look like: not anecdotes, but quantified customer feedback that transforms noise into signal.

From Anecdote to Evidence

"Sentiment on the billing flow dropped 20% after Tuesday's update" hits different than "I feel like customers are unhappy." One invites debate. The other demands attention.

The difference matters. When support team insights come packaged as data rather than opinion, they bypass the psychological barriers that keep critical information from reaching leadership. A support manager armed with sentiment trends and churn correlations isn't challenging the CEO's judgment. They're sharing what the customers are saying.

And that's the shift: moving beyond gut feelings to actual customer sentiment analysis that captures what surveys miss.

Building Systems That Surface the Truth

The bike crash happened because someone who saw the danger assumed I had it handled. In business, this assumption kills products, erodes trust, and burns out support teams who feel invisible.

The solution isn't hoping people get braver. It's building systems that surface support team insights automatically, so you can see the trailer coming even when nobody feels comfortable yelling.

Your customers are already telling you what's working and what isn't. Your support team hears it every day. The question is whether that customer feedback makes it to the people who can act on it, or whether it dies in a ticket queue.

That's what we're building at Make Data Speak Human. A way to hear what your customers are already telling you, through the noise of scale.

Also, I got a new bike. It's nice.

See What Your Support Team Already Knows

Stop missing the signals buried in your support data. Schedule a demo to see how Make Data Speak Human turns customer conversations into actionable product insights.