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Keywords Theatre, Service, Experience, Employees, United Kingdom
Abstract This article provides a framework for the development of a dramatic script for a service (retail) organisation. It is argued that such a script can lead to an agreed experiential goal that the organisation can use to achieve positive holistic service experiences for customers. It draws on techniques from practical theatre and is being tried, evaluated and refined in conjunction with employees of a UK multiple retail organisation. The process of dramatic script development with employees is demonstrated through the identification of the drama, the creation of the playtext and the exploration of subtext. It can be employed by any organisation where the nature of the business requires that face-to-face interactions take place between employees and customers.
Introduction
When customers interact with a service organisation, they will have an experience with the organisation. Organisations recognise that this is unavoidable, and many are now concentrating on facilitating the "total customer experience", giving attention to all aspects of the customer's experience with the organisation, in order to increase the chances of a positive experience. In business-to-consumer services, especially in the retail sector, the creation of experiences has been talked of in terms of "theatre". The theatre metaphor is one of the dominant metaphors in the services marketing literature (Goodwin, 1996; Grove and Fisk, 1992). The phrase "retail theater" is common parlance (e.g. Sherry et al., 2001), and theatrical terminology is helpful in explaining organisational strategy (Kanter, 2002).
Pine and Gilmore (1999), in their work on "the experience economy", were careful to point out that their use of "theater" was not metaphorical. They use theatre in the sense that "work is theater" not "work as theater". In this spirit, we aim, in this article, to learn about customer experiences by going back to the theatre domain to explore, literally, how theatre practitioners provide holistic experiences for audiences. Our particular concern here is the dramatic script. We demonstrate how the development of a dramatic script can be used to identify and clarify the organisation's experiential goal (i.e. the desired consumer response). This agreed goal enables service providers to deliver stimuli, that consider emotion as an outcome, and that can be managed through employees as service performers and/or the servicescape...