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It has to be part of your culture (ie when hiring). As for the cost, it pays back in understanding your customer better and getting engineers working on the right things.

I have been part of too many engineering teams working on the wrong things because of a lack of customer interface.

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As long as the developers really have the ability to make changes based on the support requests they are receiving.

I've been in the situation where each developer would take a day of the week handling support. But the support requests could be for any of the software built by the entire development team, not just the things that the individual developer worked on.

So then in many cases the developer was acting as an extremely expensive email/call filter. And the only lesson being learned was that some of the other developers weren't very good at their jobs.

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