Every org says it is customer-obsessed. Very few have a routine that forces the obsession to happen on a calendar. CID was ours — a customer investigation division, staffed by whoever was willing to look.
// The premise
Take a real complaint — a support ticket, a store review, a rage-click cluster — and investigate it end to end until you can explain exactly what the customer experienced and why. Not a hypothesis. The actual sequence of screens, states and messages that failed them.
// Why it works better than a research deck
A deck lets people nod. An investigation makes them find the broken thing themselves, usually in their own team's surface. Ownership is not assigned; it is discovered. The fix ships because someone is embarrassed by it, not because it is on a roadmap.
// Keep it small and repeatable
One case, a small mixed group, a fixed timebox, and a one-slide writeup: what happened, why, what we changed. No formal research training needed. The output is a habit, not a report.
// What changed
Post-order became a place people volunteered to work on. Support load dropped because teams started reading tickets before they were escalated. And customer stories entered planning conversations as evidence rather than anecdote.