support channels should have a fast lane for people who know wtf they're talking about

Maybe this is already a thing and I just have never qualified. I spend a lot of time interacting with support staff at third parties on behalf of clients. I also have, on occasion, spoken to support staff for myself. I know I'm not alone in experiencing frustrating with the front tier support you inevitably have to navigate. A lot of places you can get around this with dedicated reps, which is usually a function of some payment based support tier. That makes sense, but it's probably a dangerous game to play competitively to make dealing with your company less painful an upsell.

I will often contact the same companies over and over, on behalf of different clients. In the end I always have to do a little dance for a few days of back and forth proving I know the basics and I tried the obvious stuff and this might be something that warrants escalation. I'm not always right of course, but I am usually at least not wrong.

Wouldn't it make sense for a support team to track escalation rate per user and flag people who can skip lower tier support? I'd feel like having highly knowledgeable active users of your products in a big list would be hugely valuable to the product and engineering teams. I know I've worked on products where I wish there were people I trusted actually using it who could tell me when something seems iffy. I feel like a request to escalation threshold would be a great estimator of that that wouldn't require a bunch of qualification effort.