Theatrical Tools in Service Design

On Camera

We've posted videos of our working methods before, but in German.

For those of you without German skills, here we are in English giving a (super-accelerated) sample at the Service Design Network Conference in Berlin this summer.

Beyond Roleplay - Theatrical Tools in Service Design from Snook on Vimeo.

Thanks to Snook for filming!

Theatrical tools for service experience - an overview

Top practical tips
Theater can give you powerful - and long proven - tools for service design and experience work. Our customers at Work•Play•Experience love them, and I've written about them over the years on this blog. Here are links to some of the best...

Rehearsal and service prototyping
Setting up a safe space (forget this, and you can forget the whole thing)
Running the session (why it's important to break the rules)

Powerful rehearsal/prototyping tools
The director's chair
Subtext (top tip!)

Experience structure and timing
Perfect story structure (top tip!)
Starting badly on purpose
Working with contrast
Thinking about timing

Entrances and moving people through them
Stage design lessons for entrances (important for retailers & UX)
When the backstage intrudes

How to guarantee a hit
The Big Three (just for fun?)

Tool pic by Svadilfari at flickr

Customer experience, the jazz way

Lessons for customer experience from a master of voice

Over the last couple of days, I have spent a little time with three exceptional musicians: New York's Refuge Trio, made up of Theo Bleckmann, Gary Versace and John Hollenbeck. I was able to take part in a masterclass vocal workshop with Bleckmann, and several of his statements on singing - like so many showbiz ideas - offer excellent insight for customer experience practitioners.

(We spoke in German, and all this is based on my brief notes, so all quotes are no more than "my best attempt" at capturing the meaning.)


The Master on backstage and frontstage
TB: "When you perform, it can feel like a flat film set. It's like behind me is nothing. But that's not true: the music and the energy is all around me."

In experience design, we often think about frontstage and backstage processes - which is a useful distinction. But the interplay between backstage and frontstage is more complex than just boxes arriving from the storeroom.

Theo's words reminded me that the spaces behind the scenes and in front of the scenes share a common energy - one which customers can sense, and staff can be motivated (or demotivated) by. Remember, the frontstage/backstage boundary is real, but it is permeable to more than just product.


The Master on keeping on track
In one musical exercise, Theo had us hold one note while he played other notes. With notes that were further away, this was easy. But when he played the semitones - the closest possible notes - above and below our note, many of us found ourselves sliding off line.

This common singer's exercise offered parallels to the world of motivation, as is being discussed on Wenovski. Wildly different notes were easy to ignore, but the nearly-the-same notes were pure seduction. Similarly, it's not the grouch in the corner who will demotivate you - he's easy to ignore. Instead, it's the people who do pretty much the right things, but with a little less fire and passion for the customer. Their path - the slightly easier path that looks oh so similar - is the dangerous one, as it tempts us to do just a little less.

It's the same with service design. "All the other companies all do it this way - which is nearly the same. Why don't we?"

Answer: because you need to be exceptional.


The Master on intent
TB: "Know what note you are going to sing before you sing it. Intention is important - otherwise things happen out of fear or habit."

I can think of no greater enemies to good customer experience than fear and habit. Fear can be fear of trying something new, or fear of looking the customer in the eye and making human contact; habit is the innovation-killer of "we always do it this way". And fear and habit together are stagnation and boring or bad service.

Theo's advice here is that intention - knowing what we want to "sing" in advance - is the best weapon against these two.

What "song" do you intend to "sing" to your customers?

Photo by Amanda Stockwell from theobleckmann.com

Cheat the seating for better presentations & parties

Leading the horse to water

If you went your presentations to be effective and your events to rock, you will need to think about where you let your audience sit. Here's why.

Check out the first diagram below - it's the well known scheme of where we ought to sit in a classroom or presentation room. You know - the more front-and-centre you sit, the more information you retain and take home afterwards. Old news.

The second diagram, two paragraphs further down, has no hard research behind it. It's just my own experience from a gazillion shows, classroom lessons and presentations I have given over the years. It shows where people want to sit.

When people come into a presentation, classroom or gala event (let's assume for now they didn't pay for their own tickets), they invariably fill up from the back, and along the aisle. It seems they are looking for a swift exit, or trying to avoid direct contact to whatever is happening at the front. Even the keen ones, unless they are die-hard fans, avoid the front row, preferring the midfield.


Now compare the two rooms - the consequence is obvious. Unless every seat is taken, your audience will tend to sit in the seats where they will benefit least from their presence, and your efforts as a presenter.

And that is only the first downside of this trend.

A successful presentation is all about atmosphere (you are there to shape emotion, remember?). For a good, infectious buzz you need to have your audience up close and bunched together. If they are all spread around the back of the room, you are going to be struggling to reach them.

To avoid wasting both your time and the audience's, borrow these tricks from the hospitality industry.

First, choose a room that is as tight as possible for your predicted numbers. Then, encourage your audience to fill from the front, perhaps by:

- using pleasant soft lighting at the front of the room while the rear rows and outer edges remain dark
- standing at the front of the room, welcoming attendees there and offering them seats
- or, most simply and effectively, reserving the rear rows until the rest of the room is full. *

The result of your audience management will be a better buzz and more effective use of everyone's time - a winner all round.

* the sneakiest way is to simply set up fewer rows of chairs than needed, then fetch "reserve" chairs from another room when it gets to standing room only. Wow, the event was a surprise hit!

A Stand-Up's guide to presentation technique

My personal top ten

Business people love my presentation coaching. I'm an actor and stand-up comedian, so they find my approach refreshing as well as highly effective. Here, in a nutshell, is what I teach them:

10 Close the laptop
Do not plan your presentation by opening PowerPoint and typing your first bullet! Instead, spend time thinking about your audience. Who are they? What do they want? What do they already believe?

9 Throw out your material
It’s a huge mistake to start by collecting material. Don’t ask yourself what you have, ask yourself what your audience will need. Avoid facts and figures - choose powerful images, human stories and genuine emotion instead. These “soft” options are proven to be more effective than any hard numbers. And cut every word that is not truly useful to your audience.

8 Take what’s left and cut it in half
Yes, in half, at least. You should never speak more than five minutes - three is better - unless the people are coming just to hear you speak or you are a paid professional speaker. (And if you think your presentation is “just five minutes”, it is probably about 12. Time it, you’ll see. ) Finish early - they will love you.

7 Don’t start at the beginning
Comedians, rock musicians and James Bond start their shows with a huge bang, and finish with a bigger one. In between, they present a sequence of highlights, getting more impressive all the time. This “Boom!-wow-wow-wow-BOOM!!” sequence is ideal for your presentation (and for any service process). So start with a really strong point - your second best one - then drop down and build up towards your very best “BOOM!” point at the end. Take questions at the bar.

6 Burn the beamer
Look, people’s eyes are attracted to light - it’s why we stare at the fire, the telly, the ocean - so if you use PowerPoint you are distracting from the real presentation - which is not your ruddy slides, it is you. Ask yourself: would Martin Luther King or JFK have benefited from bullet points? (Er.. no pun intended. Well spotted, Ms Pollard!)
(If you have a huge room, you might need a beamer. But use it to project live video of yourself, or for powerful images. Avoid wordy slides and lists - if your slide has more than seven words on it, you are in big trouble. And switch it off as often as you can. Hey, try the “B” key!)

5 Set yourself on fire
This is incredibly important - we look at light, so the brightest object in the room must be you. Get a spotlight on you, and get every other light in the room dimmed or switched off - including the beamer. Insist on this.

4 Don’t read
Never, ever, ever read your presentation. It sounds unnatural, and people need to see your eyes to trust you. Keyword cards are ok, but you won’t need to look at them because you have rehearsed so well. You were planning to rehearse (with a test audience) weren’t you? How much is the time of all the people in the audience worth?

-13 Do something crazy
Do something to surprise your audience. Give them a reason to remember you. For example - don’t hand out business cards, but print your number on bundles of €5 notes and throw them at the audience.

2 Get carried away
This is the big one. I don’t care how you slouch, how you stutter, how badly you dress and how much you fidget with your hands - if you truly, utterly believe what you say, you will convince people. Be yourself and let your passion show. (And if you don’t feel passionate about what you are presenting, please go home and stop wasting our time.)

1 Cancel the presentation
Presentations are there to persuade - not inform. Use them to move emotions, and sway decisions. If you just want to inform, then e-mails, articles, web based training, workshops or personal discussions are proven to be better. Too many presentations are information orgies. So cancel them, and do some work instead.

Magic lantern shot from Magic Lantern Show at flickr.
Article previously published in German in the FrankenPower magazine.

Book your own presentation coaching here.
You should follow me on Twitter here.

Staging one consistent customer story

Watching from the wings

Before a show or presentation, you will usually find me waaaay up in the lighting rig, hanging precariously from a gantry and peering at the top of the audience's heads. This is not just to hype myself up (although it is very focussing), or convince myself that my hairline is receding slower than many. Instead, I am trying to feel the vibe, and predict how the show will need to be tonight.

In his book The Invisible Actor, master actor Oida Yoshi (called Yoshi Oida in the West) says:

"Too often actors sit in their dressing rooms or the green room, listening to the tannoy for their cues. Once they hear the stage manager call their names, they go up into the wings, ready to make their entrance. [This] is completely unhelpful in terms of good storytelling. There is only one story being told by a team of actors; not ten different stories being told by ten actors. Therefore, you need to be there in the wings from the very beginning, in order to see how other actors are telling the story".

Anyone staging a customer experience is faced by the very same problem. And remember, the "actors" in a customer experience are not just the staff, but also the customers. So ask yourself:

• What opportunity do my staff have to see how "the story" of our daily business is going, enabling them to start in with the appropriate energy and preparation?

• What opportunity do my staff have to learn how "the story" of this particular customer's encounter with us is going, helping them to take over with the appropriate energy and preparation?

And even:

• How do I let my customer see how far along we are in his "story"? Does he have the feeling af a beginning, a middle and an end? Or, better yet, a hook, exposition, climax and resolution?

Stage wings pic from pimpampum at flickr

Freedom of Speech

The limits of scripting interaction

A lot of customer encounter design is talking about the words we say. It's very important to consider the influence our words can have. But as every actor can tell you, it's equally important to remember that not every line works from every person. A script needs to be shaped by the person delivering it.

Also, tight scripts lead to rigid thinking, discouraging the flexibility which can make or break a customer experience.

As Barry Schwartz puts it in his TED talk on wisdom.

"We know why these scripts are there. We don't trust the judgment of [employees] enough to let them loose on their own. Scripts like these are insurance policies against disaster.

And they prevent disaster. But what they ensure is mediocrity."

So: give your people a verbal toolset, not a rigid script. It's not just about showing trust, it will actually work better.

(At Work•Play•Experience, we call this freescripting.
You can read more on this theme here.)

Speech bubble pic from Illustir at flickr

Presenters! Always remember...

Out of the dark...

Based on several otherwise successful presentations I witnessed last week, here's one really, really important rule for all presenters...

Whenever you are using Powerpoint, Keynote or a similar projection system*, always make sure that you are better lit than the screen!

That's all. Thank you for your attention.

*usually you shouldn't be, but that's another story
Big screen shot by prizepony at flickr

What we do for freebies

How to make a splash in the blogwelt...

Canada's Biz-wiz-joke-bloke Andy Nulman is a master of surprise - it has been said* that he "owns" the term - and he's up to his (un)usual tricks again over at his excellent Pow! blog.

In my eyes, the best bit of his "200 free books" post is the last line - "Or could there be, perhaps, maybe, something up my sleeve?"

The ideal partner of surprise is anticipation.

I've emphasised before that it works at a deep psychological level. Put it like this: surpassing your audiences expectations is always great, but pumping those expectations to a higher level and then topping the elevated hopes is unbeatable.

The feeling of expectation gets the primeval juices churning (it's all about emotion, folks!), then the surpassed anticipation wows on an intellectual level too, as well as giving a story to tell.

So Andy, I'll take the bait and line up for a copy of your book. You've lost a sale - I'd have bought one anyway - but I'm keenest of all to find out how you're planning to Pow! me this time...

After all, it's not like the man who can do everything needs help with publicity. ;)

Adam

PS You have my address. :)

* By Andy, but why not? ;)
Picture and film made at that fun Kodak site, Andy image from Pow!.

Customer orientation in 30 seconds

All you need to know

Step into the Spotlight put me onto this one.

If your company understands this and - the tough bit - embodies this, you will get everything you want for Christmas.

Storytelling an experience

Recommended reading...

I often point folks towards Frank Capek's blog "Customer Innovations: driving profitable growth". He writes pages-long posts that go into absorbing depth, touching on a lot of psychological and neurological themes in his customer experience discussions. A long read, but valuable, terrific stuff.

I've been a fan of Frank's for a while now, but I never knew he visits here too.

Today, Mr Capek used my Boom-wowowow-BOOM! model to analyse Disney's Pirate's of the Caribbean ride. He goes into his trademark level of considered detail, as part of a far wider discussion that touches on character and message as well as narrative structure.

His post is a most excellent overview of experience storytelling technique. Thoroughly recommended - and not just because he quotes me. :o)

Managing a creative environment

Playstorming your customer experience

The best ideas to improve your customer experience are already floating around in your team's heads. To get them into to the real world with the minimum of digging, you need to foster a special kind of working environment.

In theater, we talk about the rehearsal room as a "safe space". It's a place where experiment and failure are explicitly allowed and welcomed. It is a place where distractions are held to a minimum, and where tools are kept simple to encourage flights of fantasy. And it's a place where the person in charge knows that their job is to help the cast do something that they (the director) cannot do.

It's a difficult task for many managers, because it feels like chaos and (oh horror!) play. Famously upside-down-guitarist Karl Wallinger describes a similar experience:

"(It's) simultaneously doing opposite things — you want to give the sessions control and direction while trying to do the opposite, to create an anarchic space where people can add their piece with as little affectation as possible. That's a fine line to tread, between too much authority and letting people go. It's like being a mini local government — making sure there's roads and bridges."

This kind of enabling, gentle, inspirational management is already important in fields that rely on fast, cheap, iterative innovation - like software development houses. And it is ideal for talking about your customer experience, playing around with it to generate valuable insights and truly fresh ideas.

You can build a safe space almost anywhere - just do all you can to prevent outside distractions, and make it clear to your people that they are safe, that mistakes made here remain here. Don't do this after a hard day's work - this is hard work in itself and should be rewarded as such. You can help release the creativity monkey by throwing in a big heap of toys. You might give them some items of clothing, coloured cloths, cardboard boxes, fat marker pens, and a bunch of crazy objects that have nothing to do with your work but which can represent a wide variety of real world items - or items that do not exist yet. Break the tension by getting them laughing - one good idea it to get them talking about their "worst ever..." experiences.

At some point in the early part of your session, you should expect some heavy venom. You have given your people freedom and - if they believe your offer - a lot of frustration will come out. (Often, this important catharis will eat up the first first half-day). Listen, welcome the honesty, and then offer the group the opportunity to work on solutions to their frustrations.

Now start working on your own customer experiences. But wait - it's effective to start outside your own company with best cases from elsewhere, then start applying those principles. Act out encounters. Switch roles. Try other ways to do the same thing. Try something crazy. Figure out what you are thinking at every step, and why you chose those words. Encourage your team to stay on their feet (even if you normally work sitting down) and always remember "don't tell me, show me". Interruptions are good, but sometimes you should specify a director to mould an interaction (as described here).

Your target is not to create a fixed script, but to generate as many ideas as possible, and perhaps narrow them down to a generous list of strategies and tips that every member of the team can draw on.

Here's the pitch - my team is incredibly good at this. So, if you need help, tips, or ideas, just call me. Talk is free. :)

Safe space pic by thornj at flickr.

Smart ideas for experience designers

Wisdom straight from the stage

When Greg Allen wrote his 25 Rules for Creating Good Theater, he was thinking of his Chicago theater company and not your customer experience.

Nevertheless, Greg's one-page list of theatrical tips are as good a guide to customer experience, service design or even presentation technique as you will find on any business bookshelf.

Starting with the basics, some of his showbiz pointers are simple good advice for anyone working with customers:

Rule #7: Know your audience
Rule #10: Use the performers for who they are
Rule #523 (!): Include a surprise
Rule #5: Make form follow function

Others are more challenging and thought provoking, but potentially invaluable:

Rule #4: Know why you are creating this show
Rule #17: Put the backstage on stage
Rule #22: Get non-verbal

My favourite Rule is just beautiful - and mighty, if you can pin it down for your customers:

Rule #16: Create a gift for the audience. The show should include a personal gift for each member of the audience – either material, emotional, or experiential. Make sure everyone in the audience has an individual experience of the show to take out of the theater and share and discuss afterwards.

Can your customer experience do that? What could you add, to achieve that goal?

Here's Greg's full list. It's well worth reading.

More posts here...

Stage door pic by slimmer_jimmer at flickr.

An experiment...

Look here --->

This is how it works: if this post got more of your attention than usual, simply post a comment by clicking on the word "comments" in orange below. Or mail me.

That's it. Thanks!

Adam

The Gods' View - an exercise in perspective

Can you hear me at the back?

I think I like Garth Brooks, though I've never really heard his music. As the story goes, he liked to personally check out the worst seats in his venues just before the show, seeing if the seats way up in the "Gods'" were worth his fan's hard earned cash*. It's a technique we can all use - and not just when we are on stage.

How does your customer experience work from the metaphorical back row?

Imagine you are the very last passenger to check in, the diner who gets the very last portion of soup, the very last caller to dial the hotline today. Imagine you are the absolute latest adopter, the most allergic guest, or you wear the most outsiziest size. Or perhaps you have a dicky back, terrible hearing, low bandwidth or fifty-five year old eyes? Does the experience still work for you?

It's crucial to put ourselves in the shoes of all our customers - not just the ones that look like our "typical customer" personas. This is not (only) because we want to please as many as possible, but because these end-of-the-bell-curve viewpoints and needs can tell us something about the way our experience works for everyone.

A great example from WorkPlayExperience colleague Markus Hormess: I was typing up our Book of Shenanigans, and Markus peered over my shoulder.

"Look at it at 25% zoom," he suggested. "Does the layout still make sense?"

Take a step back. Book late. Get down on your knees. Sit in the cheapest seat. Squint at your packaging.

I bet you will learn something.

Experience Monitor readers click HERE for more...

Binocular pic by Operators Are Standing By at Flickr.

* If the seats were no good, Garth would give away front-row tickets to those back-row fans, or dash up there for a close-up song during the concert. And this from one of the most successful recording artists of all time. Respect.

Jacked Up Presentation

Bill Lane on writing your presentation

I'm reading Bill Lane's "Jacked Up" - the story of his two decades as Jack Welch's speechwriter at GE. A full review may follow, but I wanted to share one passage with you already.

(I hope that Sally and the other nice folks at McGraw-Hill will excuse an extended quote. Consider it a recommendation.)

"Firstly, shun the PowerPoint. Avoid the computer like it was a roadkill skunk. Go into a room with no phone. Turn on a tape recorder. Stand up. Walk around. Yell. Splutter. Trail off. Start again. What do you know and believe that will knock this audience on its ass? What must they understand, be aware of? Make rough notes on a pad. Write down whole phrases or sentences if you absolutely love them.

All this will start to clarify within 10 or 20 minutes. Ignore the boring crap you have been told to pitch - the mind-numbing "report" or "analysis" that no-one cares about.

Think, at first, only in terms of what the crowd will hear from you, and see in your face and in your passion. At this point, you should put out of your mind any evil vision of a tedious word chart. Spit at the thought of turning you back to your victims and rushing through a read of a two hundred word chart that no-one is interested in.

At this point, PowerPoint is the abortionist of the great presentation gestating within you.

Any presentation that does not give the people in the audience something they can take out of the door with them and use is a failure and a waste of their time."

(Edited for length between the last 2 paragraphs).

Amen, Bill. And thanks.

Tools for finding meaning

What's it all about, then?

In theatre rehearsals (and in service design workshops), we spend a lot of thought on our message . We ask ourselves what we are trying to say with our play or customer experience.

Hang on! Don't exit stage left pursued by a groan!

This is not wishy-washy heart searching, tree-hugging or vibrating crystals, it's cold hard business. If our offering does not reflect who we truly are, our audience (or customers) will rapidly smell the inauthenticity, and will stay away in droves.

To the surprise of many (and at the cost of much initial eye-rolling) one of the more powerful tools we use to find out what we are talking about is the collage. Remember the heady smell of paper glue in fourth grade art class? That's the one. A table gets filled with ripped-out pictures, Post-its, sections of underlined texts, snapshots, sketches, even small props. When you sit back and look, you can see connections you never saw before. And - very often - the dominant themes are staring you in the face.

The Intarweb offers some tremendous (and addictive) tools for doing much the same thing, without the Copydex headache. One of my favourites is Wordle, which produces word clouds based on any text. Often, the meaning hits you right in the eye - along with a couple of surprises.
Here, for example, is Churchill's famous "fight them on the beaches" speech:



Obviously, the repeated fight refrain dominates - but so do defend, confidence, island, British, and strength. Just the sort of positive, rousing words that master orator Churchill wanted to be heard.

And here - in dangerous proximity - the word cloud for the five most popular posts on this blog:



Hmm. Stage. Audience. People. Wow. Customer. Experience....

I think it about sums it up, but I would have expected another order - so a valuable lesson for me there. Perhaps I should spend more words on the more theatrical side of my thinking...

Go on, go crazy. Stick your website, handbook and ads through a few of these visualisation tools, and see what message you are really leaving with your customers.

PS Thanks for the Wordle heads-up to ConversationAgent.

Collage tools pic by VaguelyArtistic at flickr.

Backstage heroes

Ninja* customer service

I am sure most of you will have seen this great video, and others of this ilk.



The lesson for customer experience and service designers?

Sometimes we have to give up the easy life backstage, to make things more memorable for the customer frontstage.

PS For a very different take on "the men in black", try here.

(*Actually it's bunraku, but ninjas always sell better.)

Subtext in customer contact - try this!

A practical exercise to understand customers better

Luvvies (that's us theatrical types) tend to drone on about one or two subjects pretty much constantly. Besides fourth walls, the indisputable fashion merits of roll-necked pullovers and how awful the audience is, one of our favourite themes is "subtext".

Subtext is what is left over when you take the written lines away from a role. In other words, it is what the character is thinking. The same piece of text can have different subtexts depending on the context, character and interpretation of the role.

"I love you!", for example, could have a bunch of different possible subtexts, including...

"I want to sleep with you!" "Don't leave me!" "I'm sorry!"
"I'm leaving you!" "Help me!" "Goodbye!" "You have to die!"
"Don't hurt me!" "Mmh. Please do that again!"

Get the idea?

Here's an exercise that generates lots of insight: set up a couple of your team to simulate a customer encounter (yes, the dreaded roleplay). Try to be as real as possible. Now go through the encounter again, and for each statement, think about the subtext - what the customer or team member really means.

(A fun and practical way to do this to have someone stand behind each speaker, perhaps with their hand on the speaker's shoulder. Just tell them to "say out loud what you think he is thinking". This impro game will give you the rough idea.)

For example, when the customer says "Do you have anything simpler?", his subtext speaker might "This has more features than I need". But they could equally say "I don't understand this, I must be stupid.", or just "I cannot afford this, I need to get out of here."

This is a powerful exercise for two reasons. Firstly, it can sensitise team members to see the customers' point of view better.

Secondly, you can use the subtext of the customer's words to think about replies that truly address the customer's needs - or at least pin them down more precisely. (The three versions above would all need very different answers, and two of those answers must be delicately phrased to avoid making the customer feel awkward).

Remember, it is only by deeply understanding your customer's needs and expectations that you can hope to exceed them. And exceeding expectations is what creates the emotions that bring customers back again and again.

Script pic by kevinthoule at Flickr

Improvised solutions impress customers more

Throw away the script to be more authentic

Those of us who work on the stage are fortunate indeed - for we are blessed with an immediate and clear feedback system. If we work well, we are immediately rewarded with applause or laughter. If we do poorly, we are punished with silence, or jeers, or departure. (Or with another kind of laughter. Or with people throwing things. Or with people coming up on stage and trying to punch my head. But that's another story.)

The ace bit about this phenomenon is that it often lets you know precisely which bit of your experience design is working best. It's simple - if they responded well to that bit tonight, it was good. If they didn't, it needs some work. No problems there. But what does it tell us?

Now, much to our writer's chagrin, it is often the case that the biggest laugh of the night is rewarded to an "aside" - something you say which is outside the script. This can be a quick put-down to a heckler, a humorous reaction to a cellphone going off in the house, or a rapid quip in response to collapsing scenery or colleagues.

These asides are not usually the wittiest gag of the evening. To be honest, they are not usually very funny at all. They are not rooted in your character, or in the dramatic form, and they often lack depth and/or cleverness. But if they are halfway quick, and halfway decent, they get a monster laugh. Odd, isn't it?

The crucial bit is that - because these asides arise in response to a particular unplanned situation - they are obviously unscripted. And this makes them two things. They are:

1. unique
2. authentic

They are unique because the situation was a one-off, and the audience know it will never happen that way again. That laugh will not be there in tomorrow's show - it is their laugh.

They are authentic, because they obviously came from the actor himself - not from some highly paid, uncaring jokewriter. The gag was obviously invented right here and right now, by that living person standing right there.

All too often in service experiences, we feel that the employee is working to a script. And when they leave that script to improvise a solution for us, we are deeply impressed. We feel it was our personal solution - unique and authentic, invented by a real person.

So, how often do you ditch the script in your services? Or, if you are the big cheese, how do you respond when your staff throw the book away? Is there perhaps a way you can make your customers feel that every solution is authentic and unique - just for them?

improvised first aid pic from gregor_y at flickr
ditched script pic from z1784 at flickr