Sponsored Content. By Harry Shadbolt, Channel Director – Business and General Aviation, Inmarsat
As I sat pondering how exactly to articulate just what makes SD and Inmarsat’s joint offering so unique to customers, my mind drifted to those that I perceive are the worst offenders when it comes customer service – real estate agents. I didn’t watch the series “Selling Sunset” but my fiancée felt compelled to consume the entire season in just two days. She relayed the goings on in the real-estate brokers of the Oppenheim Group to me, describing them as morbidly fascinating and much like watching the aftermath of a grisly skiing accident, on repeat.
Far from the glitz and glamour of the LA real estate scene, my experience of UK ‘estate agents’ is that they are a different tribe. I once bought a flat, committing all my savings and most of my future earnings over the phone, after just one viewing of the property. During that viewing, the agent pointed to the crumbling windows and uttered a ready-made estate agent anecdote and a truly awful example of sales patter, stating they were ‘really good for letting the light in’.
On completing the purchase, I was given a blank envelope with two separate keys and a solitary “After Eight” mint chocolate. (For those unfamiliar with After Eight dinner mints, they are half the size of a business card, housed in a thin black paper slip and curiously come with instructions for consumption within a specific window of time). I entered my new flat and as I assessed the state of the plywood doors and faux marble tiles in the bathroom, the final words of the estate agent seemed to bounce off the stained wallpaper: ‘the previous owner considered himself a bit of a Play Boy, he said this was his party pad’. Those words and the feeling they gave me, have stayed with me long after I moved out of that flat.
I believe wholly that customers will eventually forget what you did and what you said but will never forget how you made them feel. Feeling undervalued or ignored as a customer only goes to show that your supplier doesn’t understand or care about your requirements, they just want the sale.
The key tenet of SD and Inmarsat’s support model is understanding and care, aiming to always take the customers’ needs into account. What the partnership provides is an essential tool for our customers, enabling them to do what they do best.
Consistent and seamless high-speed Wi-Fi is crucial – something Inmarsat and Satcom Direct have been delivering to the BGA sector for over two decades, via SwiftBroadband, and more recently Jet ConneX, or JX. In an environment where a principal’s day is planned down to the last minute, being disconnected, even if only for a few minutes, is a big deal.
We understand how important it is and our partnership is more focused than ever on ensuring that our support teams can predict and respond to customer requirements faster than we have before. Instead of offering products accompanied by the smell of freshly baked bread and free mint chocolates, we are providing something substantial – more available performance data, which is already reducing support times.
Satcom Direct and Inmarsat’s service enhancements are focusing on ensuring that our customer base feels valued and cared for. Providing the gold standard for business aviation is more than selling sunsets and unlimited speeds, it’s about instilling a feeling of reassurance and reliability to our customers, and that’s something we only intend to build on.