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Closing the loop between a support ticket and a customer notification isn't a single webhook: it's four distinct checkpoints, and skipping any one produces a failure mode worse than silence.
Support leads say engineering ignores their tickets; engineering managers say escalations are unactionable prose, both observations are correct, and both describe the same format mismatch at the handoff boundary.
Before building Watari, we held three confident assumptions about why the support-to-engineering handoff breaks (volume, routing, and fix speed) and all three turned out to be wrong in ways that reshaped every pipeline stage we built.
Most B2B SaaS teams have a tight fix loop from Zendesk ticket to GitHub PR, but a completely broken notification loop, and that silence after the fix is the actual churn trigger, not the bug itself.
A support ticket and a bug report are structurally incompatible artifacts (one is written for human empathy, the other for engineering reproduction) and that format mismatch is the real cost hiding in your support-to-engineering handoff.
The most expensive bug isn't the first ticket: it's the fifth ticket about the same bug filed weeks later because no closed loop existed between your support queue and your codebase.
The support-to-engineering handoff breaks at the format boundary, free-form Zendesk and Intercom tickets are structurally incompatible with what engineers need, and no amount of Slack messages or Jira fields fixes a format mismatch.