Apart from those (I could name some medium and large financial services companies the following supplies to, but won't for obvious reasons) who officially have their own first-line support (and even try demand a per seat discount on that basis) but that support is useless: their idea of providing support is simply forwarding emails to us, no triage, no collation, no digging for extra information. Heck, sometimes they are worse than useless and make things worse, like not passing on some of the information the end user _did_ think to provide.

Not all are like this if course. But the proportion who are terrible is higher than you'd like.

Expertise and company size aren't related, though, and I didn't mention it. There are ranges of expertise across large and small companies. Above a certain size, businesses are subject to the pathologies of the corporate world and can become real stinkers despite having money and (possibly sidelined) expertise.

I guess that is possible, I am only working with anecdotal evidence here. I have only ever seen the case where internal support handles most issues and less than a handful needs to be escalated to the vendor each year.

That is certainly how it should work, and in many cases it does.

We've had a couple on the dark side though. Perhaps because we are "too helpful" and actually, respond instead of forwarding on the support procedures documentation or pointing at the contract and coughing! Give 'em an inch, they'll take a foot, and before you know it you won't have a leg to stand on...