[ThomPete]

When I was at Square the design team would shadow support staff to learn about the kind of problems people are facing and more importantly how people talk about your products, i.e. what they call things, how they try to explain what's gone wrong, what they did to solve it or how they ended up with the problem to begin with.

It's the closest thing you can come to true realistic user-testing.

[penagwin]

That's not just the closest thing to realistic user-testing, production IS the user testing phase :P

[ThomPete]

Yup although the sucessful interections with your product is as important for context of where it goes bad.

[MBCook]

Sadly in many companies that’s as close as they’ll ever be allowed to get.