Yes.
See #1 below
See #6 & #12 below.
There are many reasons you can get a poor support experience. I've worked support for a lot of companies.
1. $ Some companies don't want to pay for support and want to minimize the cost. DirectTV had great support until AT&T bought it. They cut costs by firing all of the great support staff, reduced training, just the minimum to get by. Comcast was notorious for poor support years ago. Lots of newspaper articles about it. They didn't care. Now they are at least making a stab at it, isn't as bad as it was.
2. Other companies who charge for support see it as a revenue source. One the companies I worked for charged customers millions of dollars for support. We were treated like Rock Stars. Nights at the theater, weeks and weeks of training, etc.
3. Finding people with the appropriate skills and attitude is hard. Staff turmoil can be a problem. I know of one hire who was sub-optimal, but the thinking was that this individual would stay around for a longer period of time.
4. Political issues. I was put in charge of a call-center when the manager was away. We were inundated, way too many calls to handle properly. Turns out it was a deliberate decision by the manager, who was frustrated by the inability to hire enough staff so precipitated a crisis.
5. If you do training then that means you have fewer people to handle calls. You have to have the funds to hire extra people to provide for it.
6. Things change, and in the computer industry the rate of change makes things very difficult. Vaguely remember calculating that 20-30% of the things I knew wouldn't be true even a year later.
7. Some companies just don't get it, maybe for cultural reasons. I had a support case logged with ASUS for over a year. Had to escalate the item to the president (who delegated, of course). The issue was never resolved, which actually a first for me. I think they just wanted me to go away. Still puzzled about what was going on.
7a. It makes a difference on how many products, and categories, the company makes. If you only have a single product, such as a database, knowledge accumulates over time. If you have a lot of products, NAS units, routers, displays, desktop computers, laptops how do you hire? You could hire enough people so that you always have someone in support that knows a product well. But the NAS guy could be twiddling his thumbs while the laptop gals are getting slammed. So you probably would ask the NAS guy, who knows nothing about laptops, to help out.
8. People are different and take jobs for different reasons. Some really enjoy working technical issues, some like working with people, others are just looking for a paycheck. When hiring you do the best you can but you can get stuck.
9. Some companies don't have tiered support. Access to other resources (senior analysts, development) may not be available. Some companies don't make it easy to escalate an issue to a manager.
10. Sometimes the only tool that support is given are canned scripts for specific problems. Analysts are never taught troubleshooting. You can't blame the analysts if the company doesn't consider support a significant service.
11. You have to have the right support systems, for knowledge base, call records, etc. For the Asus problem I had they created 21 service tickets for the same issue. Lost count of the number of times I had to provide the same information.
12. Apple support is certainly one of the best around. You do occasionally get someone who seems to be a new hire where I know I just have to let them do their thing. When they realize that they don't have the expertise they always get me to a Senior Advisor, eventually. Only once in many years and hundreds of calls did I get a pill of a first level advisor. In that case just let them finish and call back to get another advisor.
I've left a lot of things out. There is no single answer as to why you don't get good support.
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