What the filing covers
A system for capturing useful feedback while preserving anonymity and supporting categorization at scale. I filed this because a business needs useful feedback without making the customer's identity the center of the response. The system brings anonymity and categorization together. Customers can raise concerns while the business organizes what it receives. I focus on capturing the substance of an experience and making multiple responses easier to understand.
Why it matters now
A customer can hesitate to criticize an experience when the criticism will be tied to their name. A business still needs enough detail to understand the concern. Repeated comments about the same issue need attention alongside individual responses. Anonymity and useful categories address different parts of that problem.
A real-world example
Imagine a customer who has just struggled with a confusing sign. The customer wants the business to understand which instruction caused trouble. The useful information is the confusing instruction and the experience around it. The person's name is a separate matter from the problem they want fixed.
I want that concern to remain useful when it joins other feedback. Another customer might report unclear directions, while someone else reports a different service issue. Categorization gives the business a way to organize those responses. It can examine related comments together instead of treating each as an isolated message.
Consider the person responsible for reviewing the feedback. They need to understand the concern, not simply count responses. A category helps group comments, while the substance of each response explains what the customer found difficult. Preserving anonymity keeps the collection focused on the experience rather than on identifying who criticized it.
Where it applies
This work applies to customer-service businesses and operators of public-facing facilities. Their customers have experiences worth hearing about, and their teams need a practical way to organize what comes in. Real-time feedback brings the comment close to the experience that prompted it.
I would start with the questions the business needs to answer. What was confusing? Which part of the service needs attention? Are several people raising the same concern? Those questions guide a useful review while keeping the customer’s identity out of the center of the exchange.
Capturing feedback and deciding what to do with it are distinct tasks. My focus is the collection and organization of anonymous responses so the business has useful material to assess.
Status
U.S. nonprovisional patent application, filed April 29, 2024, application 18/649,573; Status: Patent Pending; Sole inventor: Ross D. Blankenship.