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>On every single occasion at every organisation I have worked for I have discovered great disparity between the user's desires and problems and what is communicated through the layers.

This is a quality problem of the people doing the communicating. We need those people to do better, not drop engineers to get the real story

>Also quite frankly sometimes it's only engineering who can turn an angry customer back into a happy one because they are the only people who can really action change.

This is true, but the engineer doesn't (shouldn't?) have to be the face of that. Once you allow customers to escalate directly with engineers, they'll see the rest of your support process as bullshit.

I agree i learn something everytime i get involved with a support case, its nice to see your system from the other side aswell now and then, but i would absolutely hate to be in full customer support role.

I think we're in agreement, see my other comment in reply to gopalv.

Basically, rotating 3rd level support along with an alert/on-call duty I'm totally fine with. First-level, I'm not.