Henry Schubach grew up
in business. He worked
from a young age at a retail chain in Utah started by
his grandfather and learned the
business from the ground up,
honing his customer service
skills and learning how to manage and motivate people.
Today, Schubach uses those
principles at Schubach
Aviation, an on-demand air
charter service he founded in
1992 that posted 2007 revenue
of $20 million. And he encourages his 65 employees to develop excellent customer service
skills to keep customers coming back.
“It’s not up to us; it’s up to
them,” Schubach says. “We get
them to come back by doing
what we do as best as we
know how.”
Smart Business spoke with
the president of Schubach
Aviation about the keys to
excellent customer service.
Q. What are the keys to
excellent customer service?
Every business is retail. There’s a customer who’s buying a product or service, and
they can buy it a lot of different
places. The customer literally
has zero obligation to come
back to you. You have to have
done a good enough job that
they will come back to you.
Years ago, we had a competitor who took over the nicest
facility in the airport, and they
were owned by people with
more resources than I’ll ever
have available. I remember asking my father, ‘How do you
compete with somebody who
probably doesn’t have to make
money?’
He said, ‘You can’t. What you
have to do is do what you do
the best way that you know
how, and that’s all you can do.’
We get them to come back by
doing what we do the best way
we know how.
Set standards for each and
every task you have and constantly strive to exceed those
standards. Trial and error plays
a huge part in developing customer service procedures and
initiatives, and then staying
with what has proven to work.
Q. How do you communicate
customer service skills to
employees?
Sometimes, it’s as simple as
just showing someone how you
want things done. Sometimes,
you need to have more formal
training sessions, and some
tasks lend themselves more to
published policies and
procedures. It depends
on the task.
People learn by example. The stuff gets done
exactly the way you
want. If I go to a store or
get my car fixed and
something awful happens … I come back here
and sit down with all the
schedulers … and tell
them. I want people to
understand that I never
want that phone call
from somebody.
It’s so easy to do stuff
right. Once you have a
defined task and a path
and a procedure for making this stuff work right,
when people deviate
from that, sometimes things get
sideways. If you take care of a
good customer, they might tell
their friends, they might not, but
if you screw something up,
they’ll tell everybody they know,
and it’s hard to undo that.
If the customer feels like you
did something wrong, you
probably did. There’s two rules
— the customer is always right,
and when the customer’s
wrong, see rule one. In most
cases, if they think something’s
wrong, you say, ‘What do I
need to do to make this right?’
And then let them tell you, and
do what they want.
