Choosing Between Two Relevant Perspectives

Worked example

Fictional example

The people and details are invented to illustrate an approach.

Fictional question

Ines runs customer support for a growing software company. She asks two peers: “Should we offer phone support, or only chat and email?”

Two expertise profiles

• Carl is head of support at a large enterprise software company. He says phone support is essential: customers expect it, and complex problems get solved faster.
• Lena led support at a startup with a similar product to Ines’s. She says phone support stretched her small team too thin and they dropped it after a year.

Contextual differences

Ines looks at why their answers differ

• Carl’s customers are large organizations with contracts that include phone support. Lena’s were small businesses.
• Carl manages a team of 80. Lena had six people, like Ines.
• Carl’s product requires complex configuration. Lena’s was simpler, closer to Ines’s.

The advice differs because their situations differ. Neither is wrong. Ines also notices that Carl’s seniority made his answer feel more authoritative at first, even though Lena’s situation is closer to her own. Recognizing that helps her weigh both views on their relevance rather than on job title. She thanks both of them for their time.

Follow-up questions

Rather than choosing between them, Ines asks each person a follow-up question:

• To Carl: “Which types of problems most needed phone support?”
• To Lena: “What did you do for customers who strongly preferred phone?”

Carl explains that phone support mattered most for urgent outages, when customers needed to know immediately that someone was working on the problem. For routine questions, his customers were often happy with chat.

Lena explains that her team offered scheduled calls for complex cases instead of an open phone line. Customers booked a time, and the team prepared before the call. She also says that a few customers left because of the change, and she isn’t sure it was the right decision for every segment.

The follow-up questions show that the two views overlap more than their first answers suggested. Both agree that some problems need a live conversation. They differ on how to provide it.

Judgment and limits

Ines recognizes that neither adviser knows her customers as well as she does. She looks at her own support records and finds that most complex cases involve data migration. She decides to try scheduled calls for complex cases, combining Lena’s approach with Carl’s point about urgent problems. She notes that her decision is based on two perspectives and that she’ll review it after three months with her own data.