I've been reading the excellent Clued In, following recommendations from Una and Richard who both saw Lewis Carbone discuss the ideas at Mix. Amongst several thousand other amazing thoughts in that book is a reference to The Real Heroes of Business: ...and Not a CEO Among Them.
This amazing idea in that book ("real heros") is that many organisations have amongst their staff customer service champions of the sort you could never deliberately hire. These are people who will do anything to deliver customer benefit for the organisation but they are rewarded with vague contempt and apprehension. This is also a strong theme in MTCTW: making staff directly responsible for zero-defects and for finding and resolving issues (this being a classic area where mass production failed, with the sign and symbol being that only the managers can stop the line in a mass-production factory; any member of staff can in a lean facility).
Look at Agile Software development, and we're taking things even further. The primary thinking behind lean methods in software and lean methods in NPD is that the whole team needs to be creative and enpowered to solve problems as they come up - taking immense pride in the solution.
The example given in "Real Heros" is of a New York Roto-Rooter driver. Roto-Rooter is a drain cleaning specialist with a particular product set (like Dynarod in the UK). They had a particular route driver called Alan Wilk who was passionate about customer service. He identified several major problems. One was that due to the nature of the work, staff would turn up still unclean from their previous assignment. Another was that often the room with the blockage would end up looking a little discheveled after the Roto-Rooter man had called. Completely off his own back and against company policy, he installed a rudimentary shower in the back of his van to solve problem number 1, and carried around cleaning materials and an air-freshener to solve problem number 2. Neither of those things was recommended or supported by his employer.
Two things are going on here, both of which are fascinating. One is designed the product around the customer (albeit on the fly) and one is noting that the people who know what the problems are (and what the solutions are) will most often not be the people in the board room.
It's not an example of a solution but it's definitely more evidence that - given the right framework and respect - it is the staff who will drive customer insight and understanding, and - as we'll go on to talk about alot - if the customer thinks it's better, it's better, no matter what the technical service delivery might be.