0
Most product conversations happen in meeting rooms, where roadmaps are discussed, features are prioritised, and timelines are debated.
But the actual truth about a product shows up somewhere else entirely.
It shows up when a customer gets stuck, when they raise a ticket, and when they try something three different ways and still can’t make it work.
At Payhuddle, we didn’t set out to build a process around this. We just kept noticing something we couldn’t ignore. The same issues, showing up again and again, in slightly different forms.
And once you start seeing that, you can’t unsee it.
Every time a customer struggles to complete something during onboarding, they’re telling us something, even if not directly or clearly, and the signal is there.
The problem is, most organizations hear this in fragments. The fragments show up as one ticket here, one complaint there, and a workaround someone mentions on a call.
Individually, they look like noise, but collectively, they’re a pattern. We started paying attention to that pattern.
Across Lithos and Tecto, one thing became obvious very quickly: the first few weeks of adoption are where the truth comes out.
That’s where friction clusters. Not randomly, but around very specific flows.
So, we made a small but important change. Instead of resolving tickets and moving on, we began grouping them, and we started asking a simple question:
Where are customers consistently getting stuck?
Look at this example that we encountered with our product, Lithos.
We kept seeing tickets around port connection configurations. And another cluster was around timeout errors.
Individually, these were easy to “solve.” The support team would guide the customer, and the issue would be closed.
But something felt off.
Customers weren’t struggling because they didn’t have instructions. They were struggling because the product didn’t tell them exactly what went wrong.
So instead of improving the documentation, we pushed this back into the product, and the engineering team took it upon themselves to remove it permanently.
Today, Lithos doesn’t just throw an error. It points to where the issue is happening and gives the users the direction to resolve it right there, on-screen.
That entire category of tickets is removed now.
Tecto, our Level 3 terminal testing tool, had a completely different issue.
One of the customers working on project creation in Tecto for a specific card network could not filter a particular test case, which caused submission errors on the network’s portal.
At first glance, it looked like user error. But when the same issue recurs, you stop blaming the user.
Support tickets made it clear that something was missing. We dug into it and realized that a test case should have been part of the project.
We escalated it to the network. The initial response was predictable: “The tool is correct.”
And when you have enough real-world evidence, the conversation changes.
Our support team informed that the issue is in the certification network portal. It changed part of the certification process.
Eventually, the network acknowledged that customers could manually add the required entry to the logs and obtain a waiver, as the test case was outside the testing scope.
We’re seeing the same thing play out right now with another network. A specific set of card images is creating issues during host testing. It’s still being worked through.
None of these anecdotes is about a specific feature.
What matters is the loop that we have mentioned as steps.
Step 1: Support hears something
Step 2: We don’t treat it as an isolated issue. We look for repetition
Step 3: We recognize the pattern
Step 4: We trace the root cause
Step 5: We either fix it in the product or push for change outside the product
In this case, we have raised the issue with the network, and we are looking at a structural fix soon.
Over time, this has become a habit. Every ticket is no longer just a problem to solve. It’s a data point, and a small piece of a much larger conversation between the customer and the product.
Why does this matter more than we think
In payments, things rarely fail in obvious ways.
They fail at the edges:
No internal QA setup can fully recreate that. Only real customers can.
Which means if you’re not listening carefully to support, you’re missing where your product actually breaks.
For us, support has become that bridge. The place where “it works in theory” gets challenged by “this is what happened in reality.”
If there’s one thing we’ve changed at Payhuddle, it’s this:
We no longer ask, “How do we resolve this ticket?”
We ask, “Should this ticket exist at all?”
And that question has quietly shaped how we build.
