What Darth Vader's TIE Fighter says about customer service
In the original Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, we see Darth Vader has a personal TIE Fighter that is faster and more manoeuvrable than the standard TIE fighters. If that was the best The Empire had to offer, why weren’t all the TIE fighters like Darth Vader’s?
Star Wars mythology tells us it was a prototype, but obviously it was a device to make the protagonist’s spacecraft stand out for the cinema audience, and very effective it was too. However, in that galaxy far, far away I suspect Stormtroopers were partial to complaining (very quietly mind) about Darth Vader getting the best TIE Fighter!
Joking aside, do you have such a device in your business? Seriously, this is really important – do you provide an exceptional service for some and standard for others? Or even worse, do you fly in using Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter at the start of the relationship and after that only visit in the bog standard craft?
Imagine how your clients would feel if they discover that you treat new customers differently, or even that you treat some better than you treat them? I imagine they would be leaving your empire quicker than you can utter ‘May the force be with you’.
Even if you determine to treat everyone to the same excellent service, your team may not always practice what you preach, which is where mystery shopping services can help with your customer service delivery.
At the very least should use your family and friends to come along and test your team, however, if you want to deal with it professionally then you need to use a mystery shopping services company. Morgan PR began to offer such services after we discovered that while public relations can create reputations, poor customer services can destroy reputations! So using mystery shopping services like customer satisfaction surveys and video mystery shopping can ensure that your team are following your instructions – and can also ensure that this performance is helping your customers.
Once your team understand their performance is subject to being mystery shopped their performance will improve – it is inevitable. Video footage can provide a powerful training aid to further improve performance too and most importantly that it will be consistently of the quality that your clients rightly expect.
That way everyone gets Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter!