As the business aviation industry continues to expand, experts say providing top-tier service to clients will give companies a critical advantage in an increasingly competitive environment.
Establishing and retaining an effective culture of service is a daily process that starts with hiring, training and retaining the best employees, clearly defining your company’s core values and regularly reinforcing them.
“Every organization talks about its core values, but for core values to be real, they have to be demonstrated by the people in the organization,” said aviation consultant Dustin Cordier, founder and head coach at StepZero Coaching. “The leaders of the organization have to say, ‘If I had 100 people like that, I would take over the world.’”
Hiring people with the right mindset is the critical component, he said. “If you are not attracted to helping people and seeing what happens when you help people, customer service is just not for you.”
Cordier, who has spent his entire adult life in aviation, starting with an appointment to the United States Air Force Academy, said exceptional customer service doesn’t have to be expensive or involve grand gestures.
Small, thoughtful, genuine measures will be more critical than extravagance, he said. “It can be as simple as putting a smile on someone’s face,” said Cordier, who also serves on NBAA’s Business Aviation Management Committee (BAMC). “It is little things that show you have an interest in something other than yourself. Too often in customer service, we deal with people who can’t take their eyes off their phones or computers.”
The Difference Between ‘Good’ and ‘Great’
Of course, customer service must be viewed with a focus on safety and compliance being the top concerns of all employees – from frontline workers all the way up to the executive suites.
ENG Aviation Vice President Cat Wren believes there are subtle but significant differences that companies make that separate the truly great from those that are good or mediocre.
“In business aviation, safety and compliance must be top priorities for aiming for success or being more than ‘good.’ Just as crucial is the alignment of the organization’s vision, values and culture,” Wren said. “After years of being in the business, I have often seen companies that focus solely on the end game – the outputs and profits – which puts them at risk of becoming mediocre at best.
“With this mindset, it can hinder your growth, ultimately affecting customer satisfaction, and giving no purpose or true vision for your teams to rally behind,” Wren said. “At ENG, we emphasize to our teams daily that if we continuously work on improving our internal mechanisms, the outcomes will take care of themselves.
“This approach and philosophy shine a light on nurturing a robust internal culture to drive external success, or what we call, being customer obsessed. If you want to compete in today’s competitive landscape, companies must understand that a one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work,” Wren added. “We must adapt to our customer’s specific wants and needs to lead others in the industry and be considered excellent.”
Building a Customer Service Culture
NBAA has partnered with ServiceElements International to develop an assessment-based certificate program that will provide participants with mid-level training on the elements of exemplary customer service.
Learn more about NBAA’s Business Aviation Customer Service Certificate program.
“There is a lot of great training out there, but nothing that really puts it together all in one place,” said NBAA Senior Director, Credentialing Tyler Austin. “Many of our members were going outside of aviation training for customer service needs, and there wasn’t something that was really designed holistically for the aviation industry, so we quickly realized that there was a need.”
“When you build a culture of service, and everyone is on that same page, it means even the tasks you structure, the work you structure, everyone on your team has to understand that everyone is about the customer,” said ServiceElements Vice President Lisa Archambeau, CAM, who also serves on NBAA’s BAMC. “Ultimately, we are all here to serve that external customer.”
Archambeau believes that means empowering employees and encouraging team members to hold each other accountable, including leadership, especially when many decision-makers are being told to invest heavily in artificial intelligence and automation to reduce costs.
“People know the companies that have no customer service – where you cannot ever reach a person and it’s so automated.” That kind of customer service, she said, will only take unhappy customers and make them even more unhappy, eventually transforming them into non-customers. “Always ensure there is an option to talk to a human being,” she said.
An effective customer service culture can make an FBO, charter or Part 91 operation the best that it can be. “Because it’s not great aircraft or great facilities,” Archambeau said. “It’s the people that make the difference.”