I think #1 is a feature, though. One of the ways a growing company can go bad is to make it hard for most people to solve customer problems.
The megacorp customer support model is basically just to put all the disempowered support people in Nowheresville, so that nobody "important" knows how much the customer experience sucks. Which is part of what allows startups to come in and savage their business.
But there's another path: you can also avoid the customer and staff frustration by empowering them to fix problems, and working hard to keep it that way as the company grows.
I think #1 is a feature, though. One of the ways a growing company can go bad is to make it hard for most people to solve customer problems.
The megacorp customer support model is basically just to put all the disempowered support people in Nowheresville, so that nobody "important" knows how much the customer experience sucks. Which is part of what allows startups to come in and savage their business.
But there's another path: you can also avoid the customer and staff frustration by empowering them to fix problems, and working hard to keep it that way as the company grows.