When businesses are paying $20K site licenses for mission critical data applications, and something goes wrong, they e-mail, they call... you hear from them and its not very difficult for your support staff to track bugs in the system.
But what about consumers?
When is the last time you used a consumer app that you weren't "testing" and something was a little bit buggy, so you e-mailed the company with the details of the problem?
Ok, for us tech geeks, maybe that was just this morning, but for most people, they just move on and ignore it. That presents a difficult problem for designers of consumer facing apps who need to know how their system is working and where its not.
Consumers don't generally want to e-mail for support, but they might flag things. The funny thing is, even though they aren't willing to commit much in terms of communicaion, they definitely want communication back. They want to know that someone is working on something. Maybe every app should make their trouble ticket list public and searchable, and include how many other people flagged an item.