If you complain loudly and publicly in a popular forum, everyone’s opinion of the company will degrade the longer your cries go visibly unanswered, so it requires immediate attention. Your request gets elevated to critical.
Nobody said that.
> likely the front-line staff are overwhelmed
Which means that the company knowingly and intentionally decided to skimp on support, or have other policies which lead to their staff being overwhelmed.
> don't know how to cut through the corporate hoops/politics to find and deliver the fix
Which means the corporation decided to skimp on their training and or efforts to streamline the issue resolution.
> and/or too shy/embarrassed to admit ignorance and having to pass it to the higher-ups for someone who knows how to fix things
Same as above.
> It's more likely going in circles because they want to resolve it within their levels without having to escalate it.
And why is that? Ah yes, because the company knowingly and intentionally set the incentives as such.
I don’t have a problem with the front line support. They are just humans like you and me. But I will have zero pitty on companies who under allocate resources to their problems and then try to hide behind their overworked support line as some meat shield.
If I'm running a business and losing money because your service is fubar I really don't give a damn that you're all too busy or too ignorant to solve the problem. I'm going to do what I know works and that's basically blast over HN/Twitter/Reddit that your service sucks and has been broke for X duration.
Don't blame minimum wage earners for barriers intentionally thrown up by management to reduce labor costs.
There's no equivalent for "overhearing a customer problem" at FAANG scale.
It would be dramatically inefficient for software engineers / product managers / those implementing functionality to triage all support tickets.
About 0.5% of support tickets are interesting enough to be a case study the way this user has offered. At both large and small scale.
In other words, human labor would be too costly. It not a FAANG thing either, the government does it just as well as most other big entities that are betting they can let some problems slip through without too much loss.
And it works until it doesn’t.
