The little ninjas, your friendly-formed feedback forms, a.k.a. feefos – remind us of that line made famous in the 1970s by free-market economist Milton Friedman (there is, indeed, something called a ‘free market’), every time we finish a restaurant meal (delivered home or otherwise), a service, an experience – or even six months into a new job. With their checkboxes and rating scales, feefos – now backed by the superpower of AI – wait stealthily for you to finish and then pounce on you before you can even do a quick internal evaluation of product or service.
Feefos may look innocent, but they are not. They can suck you into a black hole of self-doubt and force you into unnecessary overthinking. Should you rate this coffee shop’s ambience as a 3 or a 4? Was the relationship manager polite enough and answered all your queries? The tyranny doesn’t end with giving honest feedback. There will be follow-up mails, asking you to explain what was wrong, reminders for follow-up visits. While we have all been sweet-talked into filling feefos one time or the other, ever wondered about their afterlife? Perhaps they, too, are sucked into a black hole. Despite the reams of ‘quality monitoring’ data that companies gather from feefos, the ‘overall experience’ of too many firms, at best, get one star.
