This is a photo of the actual red phone that sat on my desk at Kayak for several years. It has a loud mechanical ringer. We programmed the main Kayak help page to show the direct phone number a certain percentage of the day, enough to ensure we got anywhere from a few to a dozen calls per day.

This was very important to me.

My desk was in the middle of an open office, so people could see me rush to answer the phone, and even listen in on my calls with customers. When I was away from my desk, there were a few engineers who sat near me that would take calls (especially Christian, Dan, Gayle, Jim, Vinayak and Walter).

Altogether, I implemented eight different processes for doing customer research at Kayak. Today I feel like this rigor helped keep the Kayak engineers focused on what works and what does not work, and what things confused customers.

I particularly liked talking with angry customers, as I saw them as just being passionate people who had a bad experience. When I fixed their problem, they became the biggest cheerleaders at Kayak.