CX Strategic Knowledge · Quality & Research
Customers are not your canary
It is not the customer's job to tell you that you got it wrong. Complaints are not a QA process.
If customers are discovering your defects, your process is broken. Teams that ship defects into production and wait for complaints have outsourced quality assurance to the people paying them. Most harmed customers never complain — they just leave.
The principle is blunt: it is not the customer's job to tell you that you got it wrong. Yet many teams operate exactly that way — move fast and break things, ship defects into production, and treat complaints as the detection system.
Complaints are a terrible defect signal. They arrive late, from a fraction of affected users, after the damage is done. The governance rule is simple: if customers are discovering defects, your process is broken. Find them first, in testing, under real conditions.
It's not the customer's job to tell you that you got it wrong.
Apply this
Reading about customers are not your canary is one thing. Seeing where it applies in your journey is the useful part.