The thing that boggles my mind is the lack of formal escalation in modern support departments. It existed because it was a good model: it worked, while managing headcount and cost. Your front line people aren't trained or paid to know everything, but for God's sake have someone backstopping them up with deeper knowledge and access!
Spoiler: there is no such thing as “escalation” most of the time. CSRs at the same level escalate to each other just to make you feel good. My wife use to work as a CSR at Verizon.
When I was in college, I worked CSR for a software product, and we definitely had an escalation path.
My level, to any peers who might know about the specific issue, to our management, and then to engineering (if technical) or our support VP (if business). And it was critical, because inevitable engineering "Oh, that doesn't work that way, but we never wrote it down" or "Oh, I guess that would be a thing people would want to do."
Sadly, after the company was bought the system was collapsed down to the standard front-line-or-close.
For support where someone needs help yes there was a real “escalation path”. But when Karen called complaining about a policy, they were “escalated” to someone else telling them the same thing.
