The Theatre of Customer Experience (And Why It’s Bankrupting You)

Let me be brutally honest about what passes for customer experience in most organisations: it’s expensive theatre.

You know the script. Hire consultants. Run workshops. Create journey maps. Identify pain points. Launch initiatives. Build dashboards. Everyone congratulates themselves on being customer-focused.

Then nothing fundamentally changes.

We witnessed this performance across countless organisations. It’s elaborate, expensive, and designed to make executives feel good about their customer centricity whilst having minimal impact on actual customer behaviour.

Here’s a real example: A major retail bank spent eighteen months redesigning their onboarding process. They reduced account opening time from fourteen to nine minutes. They decreased form fields from forty-three to twenty-eight. They improved completion rates by 12%. Awards were submitted. Executives were proud.

Then a digital competitor entered the market and started stealing customers at an alarming rate. Their onboarding took fifteen minutes—longer than the optimised bank. Their form had more fields. Their technology was less sophisticated.

But they created three specific moments of truth that made customers feel genuinely understood, valued, and excited about their financial future.

That’s the difference between customer experience theatre and genuine moments of truth. One is defensive—about being less bad. The other is offensive—about creating magnetism that pulls customers towards you.

As someone who positions themselves as The Experiential Innovator, I’ve developed frameworks specifically to help organisations break free from this theatre. The i5 Framework (Ideate, Innovate, Incubate, Initiate, Impact) helps transform customer experience from performance art into strategic advantage.

Stop optimising mediocrity. Start creating brilliance. Because whilst you’re smoothing rough edges, your competitors are crafting experiences that customers can’t stop talking about.

The theatre needs to end. Real performance needs to begin.