Yes, good vs bad shielding is what it all comes down to. Some examples I remember from my struggles in the past:
Working hard to remove duplicates is great, but frequent reports have to be signaled as urgent to the devs.
Then there is the tendency to only forward stuff that is somewhat reproducible, especially for unique reports. This makes entire classes harder to get through.
Sure I could find more... so yeah, many structural aspects of the job are set us up to break the link between customers and devs unless everyone is mindful.
I once worked with a pretty good customer support manager. They had two mechanisms for trying to handle that. Both were based on having the support people categorize issues. (Presumably based on error messages, some manual review, symptoms, etc.)
They'd then compile a weekly-ish report of (1) top 10 most common issues they were seeing, and (2) issues that were new this week or went up a lot from previous weeks.
That information as pretty easily digestible for the development team, and it helped us understand the size of the impact of known issues. And ones we didn't recognize, we could request more information on.
The support manager also made a point that if a new issue came up and seemed to be particularly prevalent or major, they would proactively contact dev instead of waiting for someone to read a weekly report.
Working hard to remove duplicates is great, but frequent reports have to be signaled as urgent to the devs.
Then there is the tendency to only forward stuff that is somewhat reproducible, especially for unique reports. This makes entire classes harder to get through.
Sure I could find more... so yeah, many structural aspects of the job are set us up to break the link between customers and devs unless everyone is mindful.