Focus on your customers
While Reid and his team took a number of actions on the cost front, they decided early on to not cut anything that customers saw or touched, because they were already known for their personalized, high-level service.
“If our strong point was high service and we could get better at that area, we’d do a better job of retaining and attracting new business,” he says.
One of the first things he did was spend in the high six figures building a new type of concierge service for customers. The way Flexjet was set up required the customer to have several different numbers to call regarding different questions or problems. To make things easier for the customer, Reid and his team decided to make their employees do the running around and be problem solvers, so they combined several tasks and trained employees to be concierges and fulfill all of the requests. Now the customer had just one number to call instead of as many as six.
They launched a pilot program for this a little over a year ago, and the early reaction was 100 percent positive. By the end of this year, it will cover the entire customer base.
“We did a lot of benchmarking on what is commonly seen as companies that provide very strong brand value and high level of services and looked under the hood at the companies that are the best companies to work for,” Reid says.
Some of those companies he looked at were Lexus, Nordstrom and Southwest Airlines.
“We also spent a lot of time asking our customers, particularly face to face, of what they’d like to see change and what they thought was good,” Reid says. “So we took a lot of cues from our customers, so they had a very large input into it.”
He says this is a critical step in both meeting your customers’ needs and improving your service for them.
“Your best bet is to consistently ask your customers how you’re doing,” Reid says.
Reid does this through an owner advisory board. The program started three years ago before he arrived, and there would be one owner advisory board meeting a year with 12 flight owners. He invites them to Dallas, gives them an extremely nice dinner, and then spends six to eight hours the next day showing them the company’s numbers.
“Because we’re not a publicly traded company, we have them sign confidentiality agreements, but we show them our numbers,” he says. “We show them where we make money. We show them our strategy. We show them our marketing. We show them our service plan, and they’re very active, and people develop a real bond to a company that flies them around personally. It’s a matter of trust.”
While that creates a bond with customers and allows Reid to get inside their heads, it wasn’t enough, so he expanded the program to do five last year — despite the team’s hesitancy because of the amount of work involved with just one. Each one also had between 12 and 20 owners this time and their significant others could come, as well.
“We harvested all their input and acted on many of them, and I now have a personal, face-to-face bond with more than 120 owners, where before it was 12 or 15,” he says.
Getting feedback is one thing, but go a step further with that information.
“The other thing is to set very high standards and continue to raise the bar,” he says.
For example, for every one-way flight leg that Flexjet operates, it scores it on a metric he calls flawless execution. A flawless flight is 100. If anything goes wrong, it’s a zero.
“What I mean by anything — that is anything that inconveniences the customer, even if it doesn’t have to do with us,” Reid says. “So we operate a flight — the pilots are there, it takes off on time, the catering is perfect, lands on time, and the limo is seven minutes late. That’s not our fault — we booked it for the customer, but it’s a limo company, and we take the hit.”
With such a strict standard for excellence, it would seem difficult to score high, but one year the company earned a 94 percent. The following year, it was 95, and now, despite the downturn, it’s up to 96.
He says, “We know we’ll probably never reach 100, but we try to continue to raise the bar on our own service.”
