Feedback or no feedback

One of the projects I'm working on is to improve how we accept, solicit, process and log user feedback. Users are (quite obviously) often those who have the most to say about how a product works and can be improved, but often it is frustratingly difficult to let anyone know about what little tweak could have changed a frustrating feature into a remarkably wonderful one. Personally, I tend to be very enthusiastic when it comes to automatic feedback (enable usage statistics, yes please!), and also more than happy to press a visible feedback button if I come across something I think could be improved. (I also quite enjoy surveys and even telephone polling, but I fear that's just me...)

However, I pretty much never make an effort if I can't easily see how to send feedback, and I tend to drop out of the process if I have to write much, share personal details or use captchas or similar. Why can't they just make it easy for me?, I think. While my personal anecdotes and preferences don't necessarily mean much, in a user feedback situation, you should be hard pressed to find a solution that makes it too easy to submit your thoughts. With that in mind, I'm looking for a system that can help users let us know when things are bad - or good, although I suspect the inclination for giving positive feedback is rather less frequent? - at the click of a button. Screen grabs (with privacy options), data dumps, stack traces and other technical information should be  automatically included. And the feedback should be categorisable, logged, manageable and easy to respond to for customer facing teams in all parts of the business. Easy, peasy, right?

Obviously not - apart from finding the perfect system, which is hard enough in itself, there will undoubtedly be a lot of work integrating it with the technical architecture of the site and securing operational support, as well as processing the data, making it usable for everyone in the best possible way - from the user to the business teams: customer satisfaction and product development, development and operations, management and marketing, and any other teams involved.

So there's a way to go, but I am really happy to have started working on it, and confident that we'll find a solution that will improve as we use it. Without feedback, the only people improving any product will be the ones who develop it, and there is definitely such a thing as being to close to your own babies...