Application Support - What should a developer's role be?

The title alludes to a question that my team and I have been asking a lot lately.  We support many applications, one of them being a custom developed Company Portal.  Our team has grown and shrunk over the past year from 15 developers to now only 5 (as an aside, the other 10 developers have either left the organization or they have been assigned to another team - but the number of applications supported remains the same.)

Each week a developer monitors the support queues, interfaces with the customer and resolves the issue.  The problem lies in the fact that these days the a good portion of the tickets we deal with day to day are not bugs with the application per se, but are administrative in nature. 

By administrative, I mean that a ticket normally falls into one of the following categories:

• A user forgot their password, so we have to redirect them to the "Reset Password" page.
• A minor table edit must be done because one of the data sources feeding into our applications isn't working right.
• We need to tell our power users how they can perform a task themselves using the tools we provided.

Each of the above situations - resulting in 67% of the tickets we receive - could benefit from a Level 2 support person.  Someone between the user and us.  The help desk in our organization is fairly close to useless - which I would expect in my industry.  They do well with what they *can* do, but unfortunately it's not a lot.

Now, back to the size of our team.  When we had 15 developers, you were on support just about every 4 months.  Therefore, with that level of frequency, it was an annoyance, but quickly forgotten in the months following your stint.  With only 5 developers, though, we end up on support just about every month. 

This means that every developer loses a week of development to a support rotation EVERY MONTH.  This is a very frustrating situation as just when we get in a groove, we have to shift gears into a completely different role. 

We have expressed our annoyance to the powers that be, but as always, it's a money/head-count situation.  How do we add a resource to perform these "brain-dead" tasks when our headcount is frozen?  The other option suggested is we take the most Jr. developer on the team and make her the support person - but that doesn't develop her for the future and is certain to make her leave - and then we may lose her headcount forever. 

I'm at a loss.  We're hoping and praying that we get an additional head when the budgets come out for next year - but that's not a guarantee.

Does anyone have any input or suggestions?

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