Peter Halle link
"I can assure you that the higher ups of FESTOOL know about this forum. CHRISTIAN who is the CSO or CEO (depending on who is writing what) was instrumental in the development and growth of this forum while he was based in the US. He and I have had conversations regarding the forum within the last year and yes, he does regularly read posts. So do others and they have been doing that for years.
Peter"
Other business leaders would die to have the kind of frank feedback -- even though sometimes less friendly or less courteous -- that this Forum has been collecting. I would be very surprised that Festool executives or designated managers would not be monitoring the comments expressed in this Forum. Companies -- banks, automakers, retailers (A&W, MacDonald's, etc.), fashions -- pay outside agencies to collect customer feedback on their behalf and the information they collect is not even as rich as that we see here in the Forum.
Other tool vendors or makers go to woodworking forums to scan and collect information relating to their companies (products, customer service, etc.) so they know what the endusers are saying about them. Woodworking magazines do the same. That is why they join the social media, too, to get in touch with customers in a way that the traditional channels (emails, telephone and snail mails) cannot replace.
In the old days (pre-Internet), the company I worked for had a dedicated dept. (Public Relations & Publicity) that monitored the press, columnists, customer complaints, service feedback and other community channels. Each morning, we received the "Digest" prepared by them covering news, service development and legislation relating to our industry so we all knew more about the outside world around us when we made our internal executive decisions. The people working to collect information were full-time head counts mostly with journalism, business or market survey and research backgrounds. We were just about to incorporate emails in our system in those days.
One more thing: I also had a Manager coordinating and handling complaints, regardless of the nature of them. This way, the complainant had only one party to deal with. The Manager redirected the complaints to the relevant dept or managers as he saw fit. Outsiders didn't know or didn't want to know how your internal system worked and so we put in place one person (at a managerial level) as their contact point.