A long long time ago when I was a desktop support grunt at Sun Microsystems, I encountered the best support feedback mechanism in the world. Every time you closed a ticket, it generated an email to the person who opened the ticket. The email had three faces in it: a smile, a frown, and a neutral. Each face was linked to a URL. Click the appropriate face, register your opinion, go on with your day.
We had a target percentage of smiles. If you ever got a frown, you went down and talked to the person who was unhappy and got the issue resolved; then you told your manager about how you fixed the problem. This process cut down on the number of people who submitted spurious frowns. When your casual expression of dissatisfaction results in a human being asking how she can make it better, you start getting in the habit of saving the frowns for real problems.
The system was very easy to implement. The URLs were something like http://feedback.sun.com/?ticket=XXXXX&happy=1. You don’t need a web app to process that, you just need to run the logs through a bit of perl to aggregate stats. Sun probably was dumping the results into a database cause that’s very simple, but even that wouldn’t take barely any programming. No authentication or anything.
It is, therefore, quite satisfying for me to read this article on HappyOrNot. They’re a Finnish startup that makes a physical version of the smiley face feedback tool. They’re smart, they get the requirement to be frictionless, and they kept the product simple. You just press the button.
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