[plasma]

nitpick: If I’ve reached out to support with a problem or idea, don’t tell me to repost it to an idea forum you have, do that for me, I’ve already told you about it.

I’ve often given up at that point when I’m asked to do this.

edit: agree with the rest of your post :)

[anonytrary]

I don't like this either and frankly, it's embarrassing when billion-dollar companies have poor support UX. Like why is the burden on the customer to re-submit their report? This is obviously an internal communications problem that should 100% be solved by the company, and they're just displaying how badly they haven't solved the problem yet.

edit: I like the rest of OP's

[Kiro]

There's no obligation to listen to user feedback. I get over a hundred feature requests from users a month but I don't even respond to most of them.

[anonytrary]

I don't think anyone was saying that, but yes and no.

There is a difference between people telling you there's a fire in your house vs. people telling you what furniture you should get. Bug reports and feature requests should be treated as different beasts in customer support flows.

In any case, it depends on what service you're providing or what product you're selling, whether or not the reports are high-value and would impact the success of your business, what the they're about, etc. The onus is on the company to determine these things for themselves.

The only reason I can think of for redirecting a user is if you're using it as some sort of quality control barrier to weed out the low quality and non-essential reports.

[TallGuyShort]

Sometimes this is done to when they're actually is a contractual obligation. I pay for Microsoft Azure support, for instance. And it's quite common for them to refer me to Github when I have problems using their SDKs, or to just tell me they can't help when the problem lies with a team other than the one that my support case was automatically assigned to. Instead of taking ownership of the issue as a company, I have to resubmit the issue see several different ways hoping to catch the gracious attention of someone who can help.

[timavr]

It is a resources allocation problem.

Support is very linear in nature. More issues you have, more people you need to take in feedback and act on it. For early companies with very MVP products, support can just kill them, because they will spend all day long doing support stuff vs building. By definition their products are going to be bad.

On top of that reporting issue is just 1% of work, because you actually need someone to go and reproduce that issue. If it is a feature request, then it is another massive chunk of work to spec it and even decide to do it or not to do it.

Also when you post it in the forum, it is way easier to get back to and companies will ask to login support tickets with production accout details, so they can actually go back into the logs and match that data.