How do you create and evaluate customer service?
Training is one way to keep the quality of service up. Voyager Jet Center spent roughly $650,000 on employee training last year. Most of that training was simulator training for the pilots, but we also train our dispatchers and our line service personnel. As a company, we sell several types of products, so our line service personnel need to be trained in safe and efficient service.
A lot of the customers are my friends or associates so I will call them and ask them or send them an e-mail and ask, ‘How was your trip last night?’ By constantly evaluating what our service is by getting feedback from our clients, we hope to improve our service.
We have evaluation forms … for the pilots to fill out who come in and buy fuel from us or use our facilities.
For employees, we have a standard evaluation process. I’m a big believer in the sandwich technique, the good the bad and the good. So I would say, ‘Mark you’re doing a great job; however, you’ve been tardy three times in the past two months, so once you correct that, overall, you’ve done a good job.’ Evaluating progress is critical. Otherwise the employee would be operating in a vacuum.
How do you improve customer service?
Listen to what the customer says and listen to what the employee says. The employee knows more about his job than you do, so listen to him and then react.
Make sure that you involve employees in the decision-making process. Push decision-making down and make sure that each employee has bought in to the goals of the company. Employees need to understand what the goal of the company is, and they need to buy in to it. By involving them in the decisions, it becomes their decision, not your decision.
How has customer service helped grow your business?
We sit in one airplane every week. We sit in it for several hours, and we open every drawer and open every table and look in every nook and cranny to make sure it’s clean and that some old magazines haven’t gotten in there. That’s very important to us.
People talk about what’s a good restaurant or what’s a good tailor and who’s a good jet provider. Who can you rely on, who’s safe? So if you have a cadre of happy customers, then they’ll tell their friends, and that’s an important manner in which to build the business.
HOW TO REACH: Voyager Jet Center, (412) 267-8000, or www.voyagerjet.com
