First thanks for your response
> A theme of how you describe your interactions was to throw the support team under the bus, and/or highlight their failures to help you when interacting with an executive.
I left out a lot of details, which I know means that a lot of assumptions will necessarily be made. I think you're reading into my comment something I didn't do. To give more details on the interaction. There was no phone support, only email and support took almost 2 weeks to response to my dilemma, which exceeded the response time expected by US Customs and the stuff I purchased was returned. They didn't respond to 3 additional requests within that two week period. When they finally responded, they couldn't solve the problem. The only real failure of the support team was that they were grossly understaffed. There's no reason for two week wait times, especially for a customer that just placed an order for multiple thousands of dollars which they charged the customer for when it was shipped, not delivered.
When I reached out to the executive to explain the problem. They only fault I gave to support was stating that they must be grossly understaffed if the response times were as long as they were. In my message, I placed the responsibility for fixing that particular issue of understaffing on the executive in question (head of ecommerce). Other issues that needed attention was how they were handling international fulfillment was causing them defects and costing them probably $100 or more per defect on shipments to the United States. I had already reached out to the partner company they worked with and was in contact with that company's United States CEO. Together we figured out the issue and I was relaying the fixes to the head of ecommerce for the company so he could fix the problem at the root because the buck stopped with him. I was solving a very real problem for them that was costing them money and I did all the research into the fix and provided the person who was ultimately responsible with fixes. I did this because I was trying to fix the problem myself during those two weeks before US customs sent my order back.
Passing the buck when it's your job and a customer has figured out the problem and handed you the solution on a silver platter is highly unprofessional.
Regarding your recomendation to use the system. It's a good one and one I'm familiar with. I use it often, but in my original example above I did not because the system in question had no interfaces to interact with besides a support email. There was no phone system, no chat system, not brick and mortar store, no support agents, etc. It was a system with a single interface that provided no interactivity (I can't dial 0 or ask to speak with the right person). The only interfaces available were that email address, US Customs and the shipping company.
Has there been interfaces that could be probed and exploited to solve the problem, yes, I totally agree with your approach.