How many times have you been in a meeting when a senior leader asks, “Have you ever used the app?” Only for blank faces staring back at them from around the table.
I would hope not all, but definitely most CRM teams have never watched a real customer use the thing they’re sending campaigns about. They’ve seen the journey map. They haven’t seen the queue.
This is a short, deliberately unglamorous exercise: spend thirty minutes as your own customer, on purpose, on a schedule, and bring back one thing your dashboard couldn’t have told you. Sound intriguing? Well, here’s how to do it…
Before you go
Pick one moment, not the whole journey. First order, loyalty sign-up, a refund request, one thing, not “the customer experience” in general.
Set one question. Not a checklist of things to check off. One thing you genuinely don’t know the answer to, like “why do people abandon the loyalty sign-up at the same step every time.”
Leave the marketing hat at your desk. No journey map open on your phone, no script. You’re a customer today, not an auditor.
While you’re there
Do the actual thing. Order the food, book the slot, use the app, right through to the end, including the annoying bits.
Watch before you intervene. Don’t ask staff to explain anything yet. Notice what actually happens: how long the queue really took, whether the loyalty card scanned first try, where you nearly gave up.
Talk to whoever’s on the floor, not the manager. The person on the till or answering the phone hears more honest customer reactions in a day than most CRM teams hear in a quarter. Ask what they’re hearing lately.
When something surprises you, ask why twice. The first reason is usually the convenient one. The second is usually the real one.
Record your experience. Use your phone to video it, or even just record you talking about the experience as you go through it. Capturing your thoughts live will mean you don’t forget that one golden insight later.
After you’re back
Write it down within the hour, before it turns into a tidy anecdote. Hopefully you already have video / audio, if so, rewatch / listen to it and write up anything further. Rough notes are fine. What actually happened matters more than how well it reads.
Bring it into the next campaign brief, by name. Not as a slide, as a sentence: “when I did this myself, X happened, so we’re changing Y.”
Be willing to pull something. If what you saw means a campaign you’d already planned doesn’t actually help the person receiving it, that’s a good enough reason to hold it.
Why this is worth thirty minutes
Dashboards are excellent at telling you what happened. They’re not built to tell you why. The difference between those two things is exactly where most CRM programmes lose the plot, and it’s the cheapest research you’ll ever do: no vendor, no dataset, just attention.
Do this once and it’s a nice anecdote for a brief. Do it every few weeks and it becomes how your team actually thinks.
And next time your SLT asks the question, you’ll have really valuable insight.
Want the belief this comes from, and the rest of the method it feeds into? It’s in the Agentic CRM Playbook.
