Can the customer be front stage in your organization?

There has been a fair amount written about designing a customer experience and more specifically how the interpretation of theater can help. The most ready reference on the subject is Interactive Services Marketing by Ray Fisk, Steve Grove and Joby John. Service theater is based on the metaphor of services as theater, which they have been writing about since 1983.

From their website:

By service theater we mean that services involve the same theatrical elements as a stage production: actors, audience, setting, frontstage, backstage, and a performance:

The actors (service workers) are those who work together to create the service for the audience (customers).

The setting (service environment) is where the action or service performance unfolds.

The frontstage actions that service actors perform for the customers usually rely on significant support from the backstage, away from the audience’s inspection, where much of the planning and execution of the service experience occurs.

The performance is the dynamic result of the interaction of the actors, audience, and setting.

But seldom do we look at the customer experience through the entire supply chain. We view it as a “marketing” thing.

However, designing a customer experience seldom works unless your organization is actually living it. A good example is Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, MI (Review: How to give great service mind map). Another example is in this Starbuck’s video.

In the Lean Engagement Team metaphorically speaking the actors are your sales team or the Front-stage crew. Back-stage is your support cast; Value Stream Manager, Team Coordinator and Marketing Communication. The traditional stage of course, is the platform that your customer sees to include website, signage and such. In the service examples above it seems well-defined and understandable how this analogy works.

Can it work in SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch) where the premise that products and services only create the opportunity to provide value. Value is created only when the customer uses the product or service. So the front-stage is your customer using your product.

Viewing the Front-stage in this sense, you put a greater premium on value in use! It re-defines your sales and marketing efforts and the rest of your supply chain on supporting the customers in their process of creating value. The stage must provide a platform for customer engagement that will increase a network of relationships between organizations. Can actors and the audience be entwined this way? Is that the experience that Starbucks creates? Or maybe a better example is Personalize M&M’S®with your words and faces?

What do you think? Can the customer be front stage in your organization?