The Customer Experience Theater
Introduction
Imagine for a moment that your company is a media company that produces theatrical plays.
What if I told you that, in a sense, it actually is? Many customer experience practitioners use the analogy that “companies stage plays for their customers” to simplify the idea of being one team — that every person, no matter how big or small their role, can influence the final product or service the company delivers to its customers.
Elements of the Play
Let’s start by thinking about the elements of a play — the components that come together to deliver a complete theatrical performance: actors, scripts, roles, rehearsals, a director, a backstage support crew, the stage itself, and of course the audience that fills the hall to the rafters when the play is a hit on every measure.
The audience — let’s call them the guests — are all of your current and prospective customers.
The actors are among the most important reasons a play succeeds, and they represent your customer-facing employees (customer service, technical support, call center, and anyone else who interacts directly with your customers). You must therefore choose and place your best actors on the stage, because they are the front that reflects the beauty of your play. In reality, however, most companies invest in choosing their best and highest-paid “actors” for backstage roles: management staff whose role is supposedly to serve the front-line employees on stage. When a company does not invest in its front-liners and instead picks the most recently graduated, lowest-paid, and least qualified, the final show is unsatisfying to the audience. The play fails to wow customers, and they don’t recommend it to their friends and family.
Customer-facing employees are the most engaged with customers and have the deepest understanding of their needs and the reasons behind their frustrations.
Yet backstage employees rarely care for their viewpoint and prefer to theorize from their ivory towers. This is where the wise director — the organization’s leader, or what we typically call the CEO — steps in to adjust the picture, restore balance, and ensure front-line employees are empowered with all the training, tools, and authority they need.
There is no play without a script, and no successful company without governance documents that define processes and clearly specify who is responsible for what. After all, you don’t want roles to overlap or for employees to perform tasks they weren’t assigned, or to go completely off-script — even though improvisation is beautiful in theater, only seasoned actors pull it off. The same is true in companies: improvised, gut-driven decisions only land when made by the most experienced employees. Lately, we’ve seen a rise in what’s known as the corporate ecosystem map — a map that shows all internal and external stakeholders and defines the nature of the interactions between them, for the essential reason mentioned at the start of the article.
Every person has a role — no matter how big or small — that can influence the final product or service delivered to customers.
Rehearsals can be split into two parts: the first is auditioning candidates to select the best (recruitment), and the second is continuously training them so they maintain or improve their performance, the way football players train continuously until retirement. Yet many companies, unfortunately, give recruitment and training little attention — let alone the idea of continuous training.
Rehearsals in theater happen before the actual show, and similarly, companies must train their on-stage employees over and over to ensure the best possible performance. Training before each actual show is not enough; rehearsals must continue from time to time, away from the audience, to ensure the next show is better than the last — or, at the very least, just as impressive. One company that has excelled at this is Disney (whose employees train for 7 hours for every actual minute of customer interaction). This is mentioned in The Experience (page 27), a book that addresses this exact concept extensively — specifically with Disney. I recommend it.
Every play has roles; every company has positions with specific titles. Just as theater has its traditions and rituals, every company has a culture that spreads and shapes how everyone works and interacts.
The stage can be considered any platform on which you serve customers — whether physically (such as branches) or remotely (such as the website, apps, and so on). This stage must satisfy all human senses. You’ve probably noticed the explosion in user experience research, which focuses heavily on providing a stage worthy of customers — especially in app and website channels.
The performance itself is embodied in any interaction that takes place between the audience and the actors on the stage.
Costumes have their own character in every play, just as the uniforms some companies require employees to wear have a major impact on customer impressions — particularly in hospitality industries such as hotels, airlines, and restaurants.
What Does the Ideal Play Look Like From the Audience’s Perspective?
Now that we’ve broken down the elements of the play, let’s give ourselves time to think about the ideal performance. The most important question you can take away from this article is: what does the ideal play look like from the audience’s perspective? Once you answer it, you must start focusing on what matters to your specific customers. What’s important to one industry or company is not necessarily important or valuable to your customers.
The Connection to Customer Experience
Experience designers often repeat a famous saying:
Great experiences are not born by accident; their finest details are deliberately designed to be what they are.
Experience designers rely on inputs from experience measurement specialists who use a variety of quantitative and qualitative tools to understand the needs and expectations of target segments. The process continues as an endless cycle between measuring the experience and redesigning or continuously improving its elements — an unending journey toward perfection.
The audience will come to your play. If it succeeds, that audience will become your biggest marketers, recommending it without taking anything in return (word of mouth). Demand for your play will grow as more people hear about it from those they trust. Those who enjoyed the previous performance will either return or anticipate your next production, especially one with the same team, because they trust it will be no less creative than its predecessors. And if your play is not successful, remember that today’s audience is no longer naive — they will fight back with tools you’d never expect.
In Closing
In the corporate world, for a company to succeed in staging a resounding play, there must be a clear vision and mission supported by activated values and a clear strategy — from the highest person in the hierarchy to the smallest employee. All of this, combined with a supportive and open culture, will allow the company to stage the best play among its competitors and capture the largest market share, locally and globally.
Related concepts: Customer Journey Mapping, Service Blueprint, Customer-Centric Operating Model.
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