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While I was at Twilio (mid-2011, through late 2013), every new employee was required to respond to 20 tickets regardless of role. It may have been a hold over from when we were really small but I always thought it was a great reminder that at the other end of that API were people building real projects that might make or break their company, teach them something new, or might be having a bad day that you can help just a little.

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Automattic does something similar too:

"When you join full-time, you’ll do customer support for WordPress.com for your first three weeks and spend a week in support annually, for evermore, regardless of your position"

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/

I like that. We do something semi-similar at Optimizely, where we have all go-to-market employees walk through the ticket answering process with our Technical Support Engineers. Makes the customer demands feel very real, and gives other parts of the org ideas for discrete improvements.

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