It's good for building customer empathy but also for helping the people who build the product understand how it's used. The intuition you build up from those experiences is very powerful.
Also, about two hours into handling support tickets for the same issue, 99% of devs will just fix the problem. So you create a very elegant incentive structure for bugfixing that circumvents a lot of the traditional structural issues.
Of course you can't do this in a big company, which is one of the structural disadvantages that come with size.