Feedback Formula

How Timbuk2 developed its diaper bag hack kit isn't a traditional customer service story. The story doesn't have anything to do with resolving customer issues in a way that makes them happy—or at least less angry. Instead, it's about how a company and its customers, together, came up with an idea that changed the way the organization related to its customers overall, and affected the way it would interact with them in the future.

Getting to this kind of product insight from your customers takes work—more work than just putting up a page on your Web site requesting feedback and waiting for the brilliant ideas to appear. There are thousands of such pages on web sites devoted to gathering feedback from customers, and they do generate ...

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