But we aren’t allowed to speak to customers and other such nonsense

As a product manager, you know that user research is a crucial part of developing successful products. But what do you do when you can't speak directly to your users? Perhaps your user base is too large, too diverse, or too difficult to reach. Perhaps your organisation ‘protects’ their customers from people in the business. How do you do user research? How do you make sure you are solving problems for your customers?

Never fear! You can do something! One approach (apart from fighting the system ;) ) is to identify customer proxies. These would be people who can share the perspective on behalf of your customers during the research process.

Who might make good customer proxies?

Customer service representatives

This could be people in physical locations, contact centres or online customer service - these teams interact with your users on a regular basis and has insights into their needs, pain points, and feedback (it can be an absolute gold mine for things like understanding the most frequent problems your users are having!). They can provide valuable information about your users' experiences, preferences, and behaviours. Consider interviewing your customer service team mates in a targeted way.

Sales team mates

Your sales team has a deep understanding of your users' buying habits, motivations, and pain points. They can provide insights into how your users make purchasing decisions and what factors influence their choices. There can be a hidden trap here if there are a smaller amount of larger customers with very loud voices or opinions which may skew your research in a certain direction but it can still be a great exercise to understand how sales people position your product with customers, if they are all about solution selling, they might have some great value points for you to consider.

The data folks within your organisation

Your data scientists and analysts can provide insights into your users' behaviors and preferences based on quantitative data. Quite often they have built up amazing models for sales and marketing purposes and that can be leveraged to help you identify patterns, trends, and gaps in your users' experiences. They can be a great help when going wide to help you further develop research questions and hypothesis to then test through other methods.

User communities

User communities, such as online forums, social media groups, and user groups, can provide a wealth of information about your users' experiences, preferences, and behaviours. Going exploring on the great wide internet can help you uncover some of the problems people post about or share and some of the suggestions for solving it. If you are considering specific features, then these insights can be invaluable when deciding on your implementation (Side note: these can also be a great way to do recruitment for user testing too!) Consider monitoring these communities and engaging with members.

While nothing can replace direct user feedback, customer proxies can provide valuable insights into your users' experiences, preferences, and behaviours in the absence of direct user or customer contact. By identifying and engaging with customer proxies, you can gather the information you need to develop successful products that meet your users' needs.