> What management needs to realize is that this is also an important interface point which requires attention. This doesn't happen at all, or is inconsistent.

> What management needs to realize is that this is also an important interface point which requires attention. This doesn't happen at all, or is inconsistent. > What I've always found interesting, is that all of these are often failing in some way at the same time in an organization of any size. The formalization of it is frequently the cause of it failing or being inconsistent. Once it's a workflow that's explicitly acknowledged and condoned by management, it will start to lose its effectiveness. As an official express lane between customers and engineering, every account/sales person will become aware of it and overload it, either in the general course of supporting their client portfolio as much as possible, or even worse, by making this internal express route known to clients, as they can get incremental revenue by branding it as a "VIP Support" service or to make at-risk clients feel special. Which will eventually end up in actual client contracts in some form or another, opening the door to client abuse (or misuse) as well as causing legit cases that would have gone through this implicit channel to get routed to and trapped in normal support because the client at hand didn't pay up for the express lane. You've also replaced a channel built off of relationships and mutual trust/respect into one based on official responsibilities and inertia, and all the hazards that entails. Such as political/managerial turf wars that add friction to the process, as well as cost minimization efforts that deskill the role over time and profit maximization efforts that overwhelm the capacity of the role, alienating the engineering team and undermining the entire intent. ... not to say it's impossible. But that's generally why you'll see it failing in some capacity any time you witness it, because it's almost impossible to maintain equilibrium the moment you officiate it. An alternative that tends to be more lasting is for management to _actively facilitate organic growth_ of these sorts of things. Enable and encourage and provide opportunities for inter-departmental relationships and lines of communications to form. That way there is no single "back channel", and organic lines of communication between different parts of the org are robust against the loss of a single node.