Exactly. As far as I'm aware, the purpose is to prevent them from reaching the rest of the company- not to make them happy about it. Customer service is a layer of protection designed to dispel, annoy or exhaust people until they're no longer a threat.
TAM (technical account manager) usually uses every trick in their book to do just that. First they take a while to answer, if they answer, they ask if we've opened a ticket. If the ticket has been openened they will "prioritize it". That means they'll won't do anthying about it.
The answers you receive from that L1 support are usually pages of garbage filled with: have a look at this blog post, have a look at this doc which is mostly irrelevant to the problem you're having.
Then you want to get ahold of TAM again. They'll usually answer in the last hour of that working day so that conversation will have to wait till tomorrow. Want a meeting? Sure! Lets talk in couple of days over that garbage called Chime. Oh, our engineer couldn't make it, we'll schedule the meeting next week. Can you please upload 60GB of your logs to this S3 bucket which is configured in such a way that you can only do it using GUI? Oh, you've split the 60GB files into multiple ones? Can't do that, we have no idea how to read those. Can you reupload?
Want to talk with someone about EKS? After 2 days of radio silence: oh yeah sure! We can schedule a meeting in 3 weeks time. etc etc
All of this makes it even more infuriating is that we've been paying for the support almost 1 million USD per year. And in 9/10 cases we get absolutely nothing out of it, just a waste of our time. For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket.
Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.
That's the TAM he's mentionioning.
The harder it is for you to get some real support, the better he is at his real job. Its a crazy incentive and I'm not even sure if you can evaluate your TAM. My current manager plays softball with them for unknown reasons so we're stuck with the smooth talking asshole. Not that we had one, I've seen almost a dozen in my career and apart from one, all were useless _to us_.
Of course that's because they don't charge a fixed rate, usually a pricier variable rate.