A little background to start you off.  I work at a fairly large software company in the technical support department. On any given day we take anywhere from 1300 - 2500 calls per day from people in the auto industry. 

Today we had our beginning of the year kickoff meeting which for us in the trenches is basically an hour off the phones, a welcome break.  The only thing really important to us is how big our bonuses are going to be.  We all listened to the executive talk about revenue, growth, profits, losses, etc hoping that someone would have lots of questions to try and stretch the meeting out as long as possible.

At the end of the meeting they said that they were at an outside sales conference with our customers talking about what we could do to improve business and so forth ( usual exec stuff ) when one person asked if they ever talk to the technical support staff to get their feedback on what the customers are saying and would like. DING ! DING ! DING !  What ask us pee-ons in the trenches what we think?  You know the people who are the FACE of the company, the ones that support the procuct you seem to throw together at times.  The ones that customers say are some of the best of any of our competitors.  The ones that REALLY control how your company fares.  If we do a bad job, you lose custmers. If we continue to do the top notch job we do, you get a good reputation and get customer referals and increased revenue.

Maybe they should start listening to us, we are not all mindless idiots, some of us do have ideas that are worth listening to.  Its pretty sad that someone on the OUTSIDE had to tell them that they should listen to their support staff.