Frontstage and Backstage

Frontstage and backstage are the areas that border the line of interaction in a customer experience. Customers directly encounter frontstage parts, such as counter staff, but not backstage ones, including back-end staff, systems and other partners. In the best experiences, frontstage and backstage operate in harmony. 

“Bottom line, having a customer-centric culture is more than just a good thing — it’s become a matter of survival.”

  — Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand & Owner/CEO of the Digital Banking Report 

See why frontstage and backstage harmony is essential for great customer experiences:

The Long Play of Customer Experience 

In service design, it’s vital to clearly understand how users engage with brands, from their initial impressions online, to their first moments inside the store, restaurant, hotel, etc., and, hopefully, far beyond as loyal customers. This theater comprises two areas:

1. Frontstage – Everything customers can see (e.g., hotel reception staff)

2. Backstage – Everything past the point of what customers can see (e.g., kitchen staff, supply-ordering systems)

The frontstage and backstage are divided by the line of interaction—which marks touchpoints where customers interact with the brand/service provider—and the line of visibility, which represents the border beyond which customers can’t see that organization’s internal actions or processes. Particularly important facts to consider include:

• The frontstage must be consistent with the brand presence encountered elsewhere (e.g., online).

• Although customers can’t see backstage, backstage actions impact customer experiences.

• Customer experiences involve many interactions between the various parties who partner to ultimately deliver those experiences, namely:

  • The service provider’s frontstage and backstage staff (e.g., waiters and kitchen personnel, respectively); and

  • Staff and systems of organizations that support the service provider, including ancillaries such as delivery drivers and systems for ordering items.

• The systems which frontstage and backstage staff use are products involved in serving the end customers. So, staff who use databases, for example, are customers in the sense they require great experiences so they can serve their customers best. 

• A brand’s backstage also includes frontstage actions of behind-the-scenes supporting organizations. For example, a driver delivering to a bookstore’s goods-in entrance is the brand face of the delivery company, serving the bookstore so the bookstore’s frontstage can serve the end customers.

• To exceed customer expectations (and abide by relevant laws), great services maximize accessibility, accommodate relevant third-party apps and draw on other aspects of customer experience design.

Design for Powerful Performances from Frontstage and Backstage

Here are guidelines to help you see how your brand’s/client’s frontstage and backstage can work best:

• Create a customer journey map, to chart what customers experience throughout their customer lifecycle with the brand. Customer journey maps reveal touchpoints where customers interact with brands across various channels. However, these show only the frontstage dimensions. 

• Create a service blueprint. Service blueprints help designers get behind the scenes and identify the interactions and processes involved within the brand itself. It’s crucial to map out all interactions that occur internally so you can understand the scope of impact between the various partners. A good blueprint will present all the interactions and the full range of cause-and-effect chains that run throughout the stages.

• Appreciate how the backstage culture is crucial to the customer experience. For the best experiences—and to avoid any breakpoints or disconnects—the frontstage and backstage partners must have strong communication as they act together, in concert. A sign of an organization’s maturity is that frontstage and backstage are aligned in their processes and vision. In some organizations, though, the backstage area is siloed away from the frontstage. Customers notice the lack of unity when problems surface on the frontstage, ranging from slight delays to epic fails. However, regardless of the number of interactions and levels you believe you can improve with service design, the organization’s culture must be ready to embrace these changes.

• Remember, client organizations may have highly intricate systems and processes. So, when you consider how to make improvements with service design, clients might seem reluctant. For example, they might have to negotiate tricky technological or supply-chain issues. Many of these realities can be complex, interrelated matters which your service blueprint might not accommodate comfortably.

In our video example, the customer encounters the staff member in the pharmacy (frontstage). To fill the customer’s prescription, the staff member keys in data and starts a chain of events elsewhere (backstage). This web of interconnectivity includes the drug manufacturer, distributor and other parties who help fill prescriptions. How well backstage partners perform depends on factors such as the efficacy of their software and the processes they have to support the service provider.

Overall, to optimize the customer experiences that frontstage and backstage harmony can deliver, it’s helpful to view every point of interaction within and between the two stages as a customer experience in itself. When you do service design right, you help transform the risk of disappointment during these many interaction points into a chance to delight: a culture of excellence that will help retain loyal customers.

Learn More about Frontstage and Backstage

Take our Service Design course.

This UX Collective piece offers many insights regarding frontstage and backstage.

This blog contains helpful advice on how to consider frontstage and backstage in your design.

This academic paper explores in-depth frontstage and backstage aspects, and relevant challenges.