Having a single email address at the top of an email, necessitating parsing or eyeballing the content to understand the intentions and then forwarding it on to

Having a single email address at the top of an email, necessitating parsing or eyeballing the content to understand the intentions and then forwarding it on to the appropriate people is surely more work, and less efficient, than the alternatives. It's conceptually easier to streamline support via a guided on-line process or knowledgebase type repository. Users can often answer their own questions, or if not they can at least be pointed at the appropriate department. I'd go as far as to say a large retailer would appear more incompetent if my only access to support was via a single email address.