I don’t usually watch these kind of things but I did find Mary Portas Secret Shopper somewhat interesting…
In this brand new series Mary Portas has changed sides. Rather than helping businesses to maximise profits, she’s now championing the shopper, and battling to get Britain’s biggest chains to put customers first.
Mary believes that Britain is cowering under a cloud of poor customer service and that we’ve never had it so bad. By using the stealth weapon of secret shopping, she exposes shoddy customer service and uses the evidence to give company bosses a wake-up call. And, with the help of her covert cameras, she’s planning to start a retail revolution.
Customer service is indeed a sham in the UK. Everything has been pushed aside for higher profit. Theres a great scene where Mary is talking to the head of pilot in front of the owner of leon. He gives all the reasons why he felt everything was going well and they didn’t need to change. Of course all the reasons were to do with expansion and profit, customer service was never mentioned in anyway.
Its intriguing because theres so many elements we’ve learned from the online world via things like the cluetrain manifesto at play. In actual fact the real world can learn a lot from the online world.
Customer is king, how sad we are for not punishing them who forget this.