I have the feeling I'm not the first person on this site to be in the position of advocating for mounting field studies for their company's software and being challenged to produce data ahead of time to substantiate the value of doing so.
Is anyone aware of historical data, academic study, or even anecdotal evidence that quantifies the return on investment from doing field studies? Ideally I'm looking for something along the lines of "reduced subsequent design cycle times by an average of 30%" or "customers who participated in field studies renewed their contracts at 150% the rate of other customers" - but I'll take whatever I can get. Thanks!