Episode #14
Come Fix It: Welcome to Customer Review Theatre with Aparna Sharon Isa Dass
Have you ever noticed how customer reviews suddenly become everyone's top priority — right around the end of the quarter? For eleven months, they're quietly minding their own business. Then one day, someone opens a dashboard. A number looks smaller than expected. And suddenly the entire organisation remembers that customers exist. "Can we get a few reviews this week?" Not because anyone has bad intentions. But because panic has an interesting way of making ordinary things sound urgent. Welcome to Day 3 of Come Fix It — a seven-day series about the wonderfully normal habits we've somehow made unnecessarily complicated in Customer Marketing. We've already visited the Favor Farm, where advocacy quietly becomes a collection of favours. Yesterday, we found ourselves in a Hostage Negotiation, where references inherit the urgency of sales deadlines. Today, we're stepping onto a stage. Because today's episode is about something called Review Theatre. Think back to your school days. Annual Day. Weeks before the performance, rehearsals suddenly became the most important thing in the world. Teachers who had barely noticed your dance practice all year suddenly knew everyone's position on stage. Parents were invited. Costumes appeared. Hair was combed with unusual enthusiasm. Everyone wanted the final performance to look effortless. Then the curtain opened. The audience clapped. Photos were taken. The lights went off. Life returned to normal. Sometimes Customer Marketing accidentally does the same thing. Not with dances. With reviews. The closer we get to a campaign deadline, the more rehearsed everything becomes. Customers who haven't heard from us in months suddenly receive beautifully crafted emails. Slack channels become unusually active. Progress trackers are updated every few hours. Everyone wants the final performance — the review, the applause, the screenshot, the dashboard. And somewhere along the way, the experience that should have naturally created the review quietly becomes secondary to collecting it. That's what Review Theatre is. Not fake reviews. Not dishonest reviews. Just an environment where the performance of gathering reviews becomes more visible than the customer experience that inspired them. Because reviews were never meant to be marketing assets first. They were meant to be proof. Proof that somebody trusted you. Proof that somebody succeeded. Proof that the relationship mattered enough for them to tell someone else about it. Proof doesn't need rehearsals. Proof simply needs something worth proving. Reviews are outcomes. Not objectives. When we reverse that order, something subtle changes. The review becomes the destination — instead of the customer's success. Once you can name a habit, you begin seeing it everywhere. You'll hear someone say "We need twenty reviews before the end of the month" — and instead of immediately opening a spreadsheet, you might pause. Not because reviews don't matter. But because you'll remember the question beneath the request: "What have we done that customers genuinely want to review?" That's a very different conversation. And perhaps a much healthier one. Each episode in this series has a companion chapter in the Come Fix It ebook — available to download at the end of Day 7. The podcast tells the stories. The ebook gives those stories a place to linger. Here's the one thought I'd love to leave you with. Customers don't leave reviews because we asked brilliantly. They leave reviews because we served brilliantly. Everything else is just theatre. Now let's raise the curtain on Review Theatre. Topics: Come Fix It series, Review Theatre, customer review strategy, quarterly review campaigns, customer marketing habits, review generation B2B, customer reviews customer marketing, review campaign timing, customer experience and reviews, G2 reviews B2B, customer advocacy habits, review outcomes vs objectives, customer marketing podcast series, Come Fix It ebook, Aparna Sharon Isa Dass
