Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: Improv: When the script runs out

The truth was that after more than a year of doing the same thing at the front desk, I had become a master of the process. You could wake me up in the middle of the night, and I could tell you, with pinpoint accuracy, how to process all the common transactions in the bank.

I had done them a thousand times before. The instructions were clear, the process was standard, and the system was supposed to handle everything. But that afternoon, the customer standing before me was not standard.

His problem did not fit neatly into any of the categories on my screen, and even in my head. I had no manual that had something to say about his situation. My operations manager had stepped out briefly. The clock was ticking. And yet, I had to do something.

So I did. I thought on my feet, pieced together a solution from what I knew, and sent the customer away smiling. Effectively, what I did that day, without necessarily using the word for it, was improvising. Improv, as it is called in the world of entertainment.

If you have followed my work over the past decades, you know I am a strong advocate for what I call the Theatrical Approach to Customer Experience. I subscribe to the notion that those of us dealing with customers regularly are nothing more than performers, our audience being our customers. And in theatre, there are times when things would not go according to the script and so performers have to improvise.

This scene—or some version of it—plays out in service environments the world over, every single day. From the bank teller who finds a creative workaround when the system goes down, to the hotel receptionist who reshuffles room arrangements on the spot to accommodate an unexpected request, to the customer service representative who crafts a solution that the company handbook simply never anticipated—front line employees (FLEs) are constantly navigating the gap between what the organisation has prepared them to do and what the customer actually needs. It is in that gap that improvisation lives.

A study published in the December 2025 edition of the Journal of Service Research has thrown some interesting light on the subject of improvisation for FLEs. The study, “Frontline Employee Improvisation: Uncovering Its Meaning, Practice, and Impact in Service Industries,” is arguably the first serious academic attempt to not only define what FLE improvisation actually is, but to examine the conditions under which it thrives—and what it does to the employees who practice it.

So, what exactly is improvisation? Ask ten people, and you are likely to get ten different answers. Some will equate it with winging it. Others might think of the jazz musician who departs from the written score to play something entirely his own. The researchers in the aforementioned study, however, arrived at a far more precise and instructive definition—one that emerged directly from conversations with front-line workers themselves.

According to the FLEs studied, improvisation is a spontaneous, responsive, and discretionary effort to solve unexpected customer problems in real time. Three words stand out in that definition: spontaneous, responsive, and discretionary. Improvisation is not planned. It is not mandated. And it is very much a choice.

That last point is worth sitting with for a moment. The fact that improvisation is discretionary means that no organisation can simply command it into existence. You cannot write a policy memo that tells your staff to improvise. You cannot put it in the employee handbook as a performance target.

By its very nature, improvisation is the kind of behaviour that must be chosen freely by the individual employee in the heat of the moment. It is, in every sense, a personal decision made in the service of another person. That is what makes it so remarkable—and so important.

As a matter of fact, the researchers found that two particular traits within an FLE are especially predictive of improvisational behaviour. The first is self-efficacy—that inner belief an employee carries about their ability to handle what comes their way. The front-liner who trusts herself to think through a problem, who does not freeze when the unexpected shows up, is far more likely to improvise effectively.

The second trait is customer orientation—the genuine predisposition to prioritise the well-being of the customer above the convenience of the process. When an employee truly cares about the person standing in front of them, they are more likely to go beyond the script to get that person what they need.

This is why we say, as I have argued in this column before, that passion matters at the front line. The employee who has no real interest in the customer’s welfare will not lose a wink of sleep when that customer walks away unsatisfied. But the one who is truly customer-oriented? That individual will find a way. And finding a way when no way is obvious—that is improvisation.

But traits alone do not tell the full story. The researchers were careful to point out that improvisation does not happen in a vacuum. The organisational environment plays an equally critical role. A customer-focused company culture—one that genuinely places the customer at the heart of its operations and not just on its annual report—creates the kind of psychological safety in which front-line workers feel comfortable making judgment calls. Similarly, an empowering organisational context, one in which employees are trusted to act without seeking approval at every turn, gives FLEs the latitude to improvise when the situation demands it.

One can only imagine the number of customers who have walked away frustrated simply because the front-liner who could have helped them was too afraid to act without authorisation. Too many organisations inadvertently punish initiative at the front line.

They create such rigid systems and such a culture of blame that employees learn very quickly that it is safer to say “I’m sorry, that’s not our policy” than to risk a creative solution. The irony is that in trying to protect themselves from the occasional wrong call, these organisations end up losing far more ground to mediocre service.

The researchers’ findings suggest that what businesses ought to do is the very opposite. Rather than building tighter and tighter processes in an attempt to eliminate human error, organisations would do well to build the kind of environment where human judgement is respected and human creativity is encouraged. Self-efficacy does not develop in an employee who is never trusted to act. Customer orientation does not flourish in a culture that does not model customer care from the top.

Now, here is the part of the research that I find most personally encouraging. The study found that FLEs who display improvisation in their service activities report positive well-being outcomes. Read that again. The front-liners who improvise feel better. Not just professionally, but in terms of their overall well-being.

Think about what that means. In an era when customer-facing work is widely recognised as one of the most emotionally taxing occupations available, this is a finding of no small significance. It suggests that when employees are given—and take—the freedom to be creative problem-solvers, something meaningful happens to them on the inside.

There is a satisfaction that comes from helping someone in a genuine and inventive way, a satisfaction that no amount of script-following can replicate. The employee who improvises successfully knows what she did. She knows she made a call, and it worked. That knowledge does something to a person.

This should prompt every business leader to ask a very honest question: Are we building a front line of problem-solvers, or a front line of procedure-followers? There is a place for standardised processes—absolutely. Consistency and efficiency are not virtues to be discarded.

But the customer who walks in with an unusual problem, who finds an FLE willing to think creatively on their behalf, will not just be satisfied. They will be loyal. They will talk about that experience. They will come back.

As the service landscape continues to evolve at a pace that no training manual can fully keep up with, the organisations that will win are those that trust their front-liners to think. They will invest in the self-efficacy of their staff, hire for customer orientation, and build cultures in which improvisation is not a disciplinary risk but a celebrated skill.

The script will always run out at some point. What happens after that is entirely up to the kind of people you have standing at the front.

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