Introducing the Service desk

In the latest DITY the following issues/concerns with a new service desk has been noted:

Users felt they were losing connection to the technical resources they were used to dealing with.
IT staff felt they were losing connection to the users they had built up relationships with.

I believe these are legitimate concerns of most organisations when implementing a service desk, however the deployment of the service desk is usually done for a reason, in this case we don't know the full rundown of reasons to implement the service desk, but it's noted:

"Our technical groups were looking forward to the new Service Desk as a way to reduce interruptions to their daily work."

The solution presented to this lack of trust is "the 5 minute rule": basically to bypass the service desk and speak to the 2nd level engineer, with a little encouragement to log a ticket first. As long as the conversation dosen't last longer than 5 minutes.

I have the following issues:

1) Though it may be nice to always have an engineer on the end of the phone, if this was the desired situation why bother with a service desk.
2) This 5 minute rule has no ending, this does not seem to be a transition phase but a permanent process.
3) The 5 minute rule was put in place because both sides do not trust the new desk, bypassing it is not going to help build trust.
4) it's likely that the engineers will be just as disrupted as they were before.

Solutions.

This is an organizational change issue, without knowing the organization in question it's tough to be specific, but here are a few possibilities:

1) get all parties in a room and explain why this is being done.
2) find another avenue to maintain relationships, form working teams or process champions, there are more enjoyable and productive relationships than user/engineer available to us all.
3) provide great escalation and reporting to make sure the user experience is not being adversely impacted (at least more than expected).

I believe it is a mistake to build a process with a built-in bypass, people always take the path of least resistance.

Change is difficult for everyone, we need to address that fear rather than enforcing it.

Thoughts?