Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Airbus’s recently opened customer care center serves as a “mission control” facility to support more than 1,000 clients worldwide, including airlines, lessors, and repair organizations. The facility, which has been optimized for team integration through open-plan spaces and shared-use areas, has as its focal point a multidisciplinary room on the ground floor, twice the size of its predecessor, where specialists respond to aircraft-on-ground (AOG) occurrences within five hours.
Each year, Airbus fields 100,000 service requests, of which around 90% are for routine support and classified as “non-urgent.” However, the remaining 10% of calls to the Airbus Technical Aircraft on Ground Centre (AIRTAC) team are often a vital lifeline to resolve an AOG issue not yet covered in published documentation. Of these, 55% are typically structural, 42% systems-related, and 3% classed as “abnormal.”
Although AIRTAC can solve around half of the problems on-site (supported by a sister center in China), Gilles de Cevins, Airbus’s head of in-service engineering, said the manufacturer is publishing more technical solutions to advance customer autonomy. Artificial intelligence has an increasing role to play in the search for accelerated resolutions, but he stressed that engineers will always decide on the action to take.
Cristina Aguilar Grieder, Airbus Services’ senior vice president, told reporters during a tour last week that she aims for the new facility become “one of the key reasons customers come back [to Airbus].” Alongside time-critical technical support, the center and its global network of partners provides services across the entire lifecycle of an aircraft, fulfilling the manufacturer’s support obligations while offering additional paid-for parts, training, and digital solutions.
With the 2,000 Airbus aircraft operating today set to surpass 18,000 in 2030, Airbus’s 8,600 customer care employees are set to get busier.