With reality shows like Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, reality is more of a suggestion than a true description. While these shows are ostensibly unscripted, people and situations are often manipulated to create heightened drama. Regardless, Kitchen Nightmares can be an entertaining viewing experience that often demonstrates valuable lessons in customer service.

In recognition of this past weekend’s premiere of the latest entry in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Into Darkness, I thought it might be fun to draw some comparison between Starfleet philosophy and customer service. Let’s just say it didn’t come as naturally as I’d hoped.

It seems lately I’ve been going on and on about media companies and customer service/customer experience. Of course, much of this comes from personal interest along with a recent bout of penny pinching resulting in fewer real-world customer service interactions.

While it’s easy to pick apart companies for their most well-known examples of poor customer service, it’s much more fun to call out the best examples of exceptional customer service.

Do you remember The Great Space Coaster? With a visual style and comic sensibility familiar to fans of The Muppets, the show ran in syndication from 1981 to 1986. As I was born in 1977, The Great Space Coaster was right in my wheelhouse for children’s television.

Along with tens of thousands of other movie-going Americans, I was genuinely thrilled with last weekend’s arrival of Iron Man 3. Super hero movies are always a personal pleasure, but the previous decade’s worth of Marvel entries in this genre have really upped the game.

As discussed here a few weeks ago, the experience afforded by today’s television aficionado is simply bursting with choice. Aside from the streaming DVD model offered through Netflix, Xbox Video, CinemaNow, and many more; a Hulu subscription delivers a growing number of television shows from the major networks as well as a huge variety of cable networks.

While multichannel and cross-channel experiences have long been the norm in customer service and support, the blurring of lines between devices and multimedia content has given rise to the cross-channel/cross-platform media experience.

There are a few basic elements of customer service that make all the difference in the world. First of all, customers want answers, or solutions to the problem they’ve presented to your customer service team. Preferably, these solutions will be easy to obtain, the experience will be kind and courteous, and the customer will come feeling as though they’ve been heard.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a rising interest in what’s called the gamification of customer service. Essentially, gamification is the process of adapting the achievement and reward schemes traditionally applied to video games in the customer service arena.