Tip of the Week: Give Customers Your Best Cheese!

By John L. Enticknap and Ron R. Jackson
Aviation Business Strategies Group

At the recent NATA FBO Success Seminar, we had a roundtable discussion where attendees shared their best practices in delivering a good customer service experience.

We called the session “What’s Your Cheese?”

If you are a regular reader of our AC-U-KWIK FBO Connection blog, you know we’ve developed a customer service training program called Don’t Forget the Cheese!©. It’s a fun, memorable program developed specifically for aviation service companies who want to improve their service experience.  (Click here for the link to a past blog which explains the origins of the program and provides further background.)

As part of the training, we challenge FBOs to compete on customer service, not on price. One of the best ways to compete on customer service is to make your customer service experience uniquely unique. In other words, no one else can duplicate exactly what you do in the way that you do it. It’s unique to your style, your very own way in which your FBO delivers your customer service experience.

In a way, it’s your exclamation point! And it’s the answer to the question, “What’s Your Cheese?”

Threaded below is a sampling of what the NATA FBO Success Seminar attendees shared when asked, “What’s Your Cheese?”  Here’s what they said:

• Our crew cars are unique. We even have an old police cruiser that’s very popular. A lot of get up and go!
• Our cheese is developing a home atmosphere, relaxed and comfortable.
• We send hand-written thank you notes and remember our customer’s birthdays.
• Customers, as well as employees, look forward to our quarterly barbecues.
• Our flying Santa is our cheese. It’s unique to us. Each Christmas we tow it around.
• We have a GPS in every crew car, preloaded with eating and entertainment destinations.
• The piano in our lobby is a good example of our cheese and providing something extra. We invite musicians to play for the entertainment of our customers during a busy ski season.
• Repeat customers are greeted with a big hello and we make it a practice to remember their names. That’s adding some good cheese.

To further this discussion, we’d like challenge you to share "what’s your cheese." Simply give us your best cheese at the end of this blog and check back often to see what others have written.

About the bloggers:

John Enticknap has more than 35 years of aviation fueling and FBO services industry experience. Ron Jackson is co-founder of Aviation Business Strategies Group and president of The Jackson Group, a PR agency specializing in FBO marketing and customer service training. Visit the biography page or absggroup.com for more background.

Tip of the Week: Keep Your Customers Close

By John L. Enticknap and Ron R. Jackson
Aviation Business Strategies Group

In today’s competitive FBO working environment, there is perhaps no greater challenge than keeping your customers close and your fuel margins closer. For this blog post we’ll discuss the former with a follow-up blog next week regarding fuel margins.

At the NATA FBO Success Seminar in March, attended by more than 30 FBOs and sponsors from throughout the U.S. and Canada, we discussed how to attract customers and what you can do to keep them coming back.

One disturbing statistic we reviewed was that consumer research indicates that only one in 25 dissatisfied customers will actually tell you there is a problem. The rest leave without saying a word, perhaps never to be seen again.

That’s why it’s important to train your employees to develop a sixth sense in order to recognize when a customer has a bad service experience. You don’t want a customer leaving your FBO without resolving a dispute. 

One of the keys to a successful customer service experience is to empower FBO employees to resolve all disputes at the point of transaction before a disagreement can blossom into something quite ugly. This is an important element we stress in our Don’t Forget the Cheese customer service training program.

We believe that taking care of customer disputes on the spot will turn an unfortunate transaction into a successful transformation, where both the customer and the employee have a chance to resolve an issue, find a solution and bond in the process. It can be a very cathartic experience.

Keeping your customers close is good business. Next week, we’ll discuss how keeping your fuel margins closer is good business sense.

About the bloggers:

John Enticknap has more than 35 years of aviation fueling and FBO services industry experience. Ron Jackson is co-founder of Aviation Business Strategies Group and president of The Jackson Group, a PR agency specializing in FBO marketing and customer service training. For more background, visit the biography page or www.absggroup.com.

Use Good Customer Service Ingredients, and the Proof Is in the Pudding

“‘The proof is in the pudding’ is a popular figure of speech meaning ‘the quality, effectiveness or truth of something can only be judged by putting it into action or to its intended use.’” – The Word Detective

We’ve all heard the phrase, the proof is in the pudding. This expression dates back to the early 1600s and is really a derivative of an expanded phrase: The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

This, of course, makes perfect sense because tasting the pudding determines whether it is good or bad. 

And so it is with delivering a great FBO customer service experience. You start with the best ingredients and follow the recipe to success. The recipe is very simple:

• An ounce of sweetness in the form of a sincere smile
• Two heaping tablespoons  of caring
• One generous cup of reliability and dependability
• And a pound of perceived value

Mix completely, and serve.

Now, all you have to do is ask your customers to find out if your pudding — or their experience — is to their liking. That’s why you should have a good way to collect feedback from your customers through a short customer service survey.

When I say short, I’m talking about a maximum of five direct questions regarding your deliverables. Here are some examples:

1. Quality and reliability of line service
2. Accuracy  and dependability of the customer service representatives (CSRs)
3. Timeliness of response to customer service requests
4. Cleanliness of the facilities, especially the bathrooms
5. Evaluation of the value received

Always add what I call the bonus question: Would you recommend our FBO?

This question is really the most important. It is a key customer service metric, and, if you’d like, it is the litmus test of whether your pudding — the customer service experience — hits the mark or needs some extra ingredients.

Another Way to Test Your Pudding

Of course, customers can be too nice at times and might not want to offend you by being overly critical in a survey.

You should also look at a more definitive metric to see if your hard work at delivering an exceptional customer service experience is really paying off.

A loyal, happy customer remains a customer for a greater length of time. So you should be tracking your customers to make sure they are coming back to your facility every time they travel to your destination. You can use a flight tracking service to monitor incoming flights.

Your line service personnel should become familiar with regular customers’ aircraft registration numbers and be alert when tracking inbound flights to your airport and surrounding airports.

If you haven’t seen a regular customer in a while, pick up the phone and call to learn why. If your line service personnel notices a regular customer going to a competitor, again, pick up the phone and find out what you might have done wrong.

Source: Strativity Group, in partnership with Customer Service Experts.Research shows that most unsatisfied customers won’t tell you there is a problem before they jump ship. They simply change their buying habits. So you need to know why they made a change and why they became unhappy with your service.

Loyal Customers Lead to Financial Rewards

As the chart indicates, a happy customer is a loyal customer and stays with you for a longer period of time.  A satisfied customer also tends to spend more and, thus, take on more fuel at your facility.

And oddly enough, a satisfied customer does not need incentives or discounts to continue being loyal. In fact, they do not mind paying a small premium to be treated well.

In the end, the payoff for delivering a truly memorable customer service experience is a contingent of loyal, highly engaged advocates who will recommend you at the drop of a hat.

So it really does pay to include quality ingredients in delivering a good customer service experience. The proof is in the pudding!

If you have some good customer service ingredients you’d like to share, please email me at Ron@thejacksongroup.biz.

Note: This blog was inspired in part by a Bloomberg Businessweek Research Services article titled How to Achieve a Great — and Profitable — Customer Service Experience.

Ron Jackson

Ron Jackson is co-founder of ABSG and president of The Jackson Group, a public relations agency specializing in aviation and FBO marketing. He has held management positions with Cessna Aircraft and Bozell Advertising and is the author of Mission Marketing: Creating Brand Value and co-author of Don’t Forget the Cheese!, the Ultimate FBO Customer Service Experience.