"What an Experience!" Our forum theatre session at Optrafair

"You want us to have our eyes tested?" asked Rachel, somewhat incredulously.

I'm sitting in a rehearsal room with my team of actors talking about the forum theatre session we will be delivering at Optrafair, as part of the OT Live Lunch & Learn education slots.

"Yes", I reply, "because the only way we can create  a piece of drama about the patient/customer experience in opticians, is to experience it ourselves."  Everyone nodded, then after a short pause Rachel said, "actually I had a card through from my opticians, I'm due for a test but haven't done anything about it."

"Me too" said Lee.  "And me" piped up Robyn.

(On dear how many of us get reminder cards about sight tests and do nothing about it? Well, that's a research question for another day, and probably needs a public health campaign to get us all along to our local optician, after all, our sight is just too important to take for granted isn't it?)

So with 3 of our actors booked in for sight tests, another 4 members of the team embark on a mystery shopper exercise to see what the customer experience is like, both in the multiples and independent practices.  And you can see the results - just download the report by clicking on the OT Live logo on the right of this page and entering your email address.

This type of research is a crucial part of our work in developing pieces of drama that the audience can relate to, and importantly, redirect the action to solve the problem we present.  So over the past few years I have spent numerous hours observing customer and staff behaviour in advice centres, sat alongside staff in call centres, visited libraries and talked to street cleaners and groundsmen in addition to working with patient groups to use our actors to tell their stories and by doing so improve patient care.

Anyway, I digress, back to the opticians.  We experienced some really excellent service, from staff who appeared genuinely interested, keen to help and very knowledgeable.  But not surprisingly it wasn't all like that.  I say unsurprisingly because providing high quality customer service all day every day is hard work and when we recruit and train staff we often overlook the "emotional labour" that is part of a frontline role. 

High levels of emotional awareness make a difference, along with managers who role model the organisational values and know the importance of praise and thoughtful and timely feedback.

And Optrafair?  Well a highly interactive audience who really got stuck into the issues we portrayed about patient confidentiality and customer service.

Have a great weekend - and book that sight test!