It’s funny how the whole idea of customer/user/consumer feedback is still totally divorced from the average day-to-day interactions of our lives.

We are fully expected to go through our daily lives, living and experiencing unfulfilling and flawed interactions with people, products and services, all without being given an avenue to provide feedback.  Sure, some interactions offer an olive branch – a suggestion box, a 1-800 number, a feedback email buried in the fine print – but most do not, and even then one feels like it’s an afterthought, that companies don’t actually want your input.

Most of the time, however, I don’t feel jipped because a company is trying to pull the wool over my eyes.  I don’t think that the average grocery store goes into business thinking “Thank god we can’t actually get feedback from our shoppers on a regular basis! Let’s bury a suggestion box back near the ice…”, or that a public transit company doesn’t give travelers the chance to let them know that their carpet is dull and dirty, or that the damn beeping noises for every station are too loud; much like Seth Godin says companies should ask our permission for every interaction, companies also need to give themselves permission – make it okay to solicit feedback from us, the customers.

Honestly, if there was some system or service where I could scan my phone or some other device during an interaction – everything from grasping a door handle to buying a coffee – and immediately rate my user experience based on some scale, I think the world would be a much better place.  Even better, imagine a service where users take photos of interactions, and they are uploaded to a Flickr-type system, where users could then describe, rate and provide additional feedback on the interaction; image-identification software would help tag the content, and companies could then seek out user feedback.  Customers get their say, companies get to improve their offering – everybody wins.

But even then, uploading to a service is one too many steps of permission required – what does the future of on-the-spot, specific service agnostic user experience rating look like?