[owenversteeg]

If an Amazon phone CSR can be trusted, that's still the case. I recently had an unusual issue that required escalation "all the way up" and at a certain point I reached a guy who claimed, at least, that that was as high as any customer could go - it was on the phone and he mentioned that the chat CSRs had much less power. He had managers of course but they were "not allowed" to speak to customers.