You can never rely on support reps to escalate UX issues to product teams for a couple reasons.

First, from their perspective if they are able to solve an issue by following their script, even if it took 20 convoluted steps, everything is working normally. People are used to occasionally dealing with workarounds so it's not a big deal in their mind.

Second, it's not in their interest to report UX issues. They are measured by the number of tickets they close, so the issue that gets a lot of inbound support and they know an easy workaround for is nicely boosting their numbers. Eventually these things get fixed by product and they move on to doing the same thing with other tickets.

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hinkley 4 days ago | parent [-]

Perverse incentives. They are judged by how long the call takes, and every time they escalate a common problem that the devs could fix, now their numbers will go down and they'll get punished for their good work.

Dell at one point pulled the plug on outsourcing their tech support. They spotted this moral hazard partway through the process and decided it was better to keep it in house.

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lavelganzu 4 days ago | parent [-]

On the opposite side of moral hazard, early in my career I worked for a large web security company in tech support. We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all. Often this meant the only solution was to apply our own, unofficial code changes!

	▲	ericbarrett 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all. I have no words! Except that I really want to know the organizational dysfunction that ended up creating that policy.