"We can't give devs access to support, because [ZenDesk, FreshDesk, etc] costs 9 gazillion dollars per user"
Simple CRUDs with non-complex infrastructure... that cost a boatload per client.
On the topic of reading support email; I think it's important that developers regularly have tickets escalated to them, and regularly hear about the trending issues; but that doesn't mean they need to spend a day in the queue. Processing support email is a skill that needs training and practice to do well; it's not something an engineer can do once a month or a few times a year with good results. Of course, this may depend on the scale of your support queue and of your team; there's a big difference in a few emails per developer per day and thousands per day.
That kind of says it all... There should be no reason support tickets should bog down their infrastructure. We're not talking about millions of real-time transactions here, even in the most popular consumer products. I should expect perfection because it's simply the most trivial product you can build, technology-wise.
https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/227...
Companies that want to get every team engaged with customer feedback can: (1) Invest in their own data extraction and pipeline to push conversational info into cross-team dashboard. (2) Perform or outsource a bunch of research and report on "voice-of-customer" to the rest of the org. (3) Use active feedback reporting tools like ProductBoard or NomNom to organize (one kind of) customer feedback. (4) Try passive conversation analysis from new tools like frame.ai (that's me!) or scopeAI
Or use ScopeAI :) (Biased since I work there)