To say the Covid-19 pandemic has hit the aerospace industry hard is an understatement. The airline business will lose an estimated $84 billion this year, according to a June 2020 report by the International Air Transport Association, and the trickle-down effect on suppliers has in some cases been devastating. But strong companies continue to improve in the face of adversity, and Honeywell Aerospace followed through on its goal of increasing customer satisfaction in 2019 and through 2020 despite the pandemic.
We spoke with Peter Kropik, who wears dual hats as vice president of customer product support and chief information officer of Honeywell Aerospace. Responsible for both presale management and post-sale technical-support activities, Kropik is the visionary behind digital transformation strategies that drove customer satisfaction up more than 20 points in less than 12 months.
How many people are in your organization, and how has your work changed with the pandemic?
The IT organization is around 40 people, and the Customer and Product Support [C&PS] team has about 700 plus another 400 outsourced customer-support representatives. As a company we were challenged obviously, and so we’ve been going through and making adjustments. When Covid hit, we moved everyone from 100 percent work in the office to 100 percent work from home in 72 hours with very little customer disruption.
We’ve had to adapt to that more virtual environment and leverage technologies to ensure that performance and service levels remain at a high level. There is a lot more focus on digital transformation, self-service, and automation to enable customers to get information the way they want it.
When you look at customer feedback, you see we haven’t had any decline after the transition to work from home. So it’s going to be interesting as we get through this to see what our working environment starts to look like, because we proved that we can work from home.
What major changes have you made to customer support in the past few months?
We’ve had a digital portal that provided e-commerce capabilities to customers for years. Customers could get pricing and delivery dates and place orders. We’ve added aircraft-on-ground [AOG] capabilities over the last few months that enable customers to use the portal versus having to call, and we’ve streamlined some of those transactions.
Customers had been frustrated with the lengthy process of completing an order. We’d ask one question, get an answer, ask another question, et cetera. So now we’re leveraging automation and technology to streamline the process. On the front end, we’ve added some capability to ensure we have very timely and consistent communication. On the back end, we’ve leveraged automation to keep customers updated once they’ve placed an order about where it is in the shipping process.
We also just launched a technical-support-center portal enabling customers to browse and self-serve without having to make contact with technical-support staff first. They can look for knowledge articles, frequently asked questions, and videos on how to do various tasks. In the aerospace industry, we’ve been heavily dependent on complex manuals and documents, so we’re augmenting those materials with video.
Has there been an overall shift in the C&PS focus lately?
I’m seeing an evolution in the aerospace industry from customer support to customer experience. It’s not just about taking an order or solving a technical problem; it’s about the experience. How do we ensure that the customer experience is seamless and easy from the beginning to the end?
Other industries have recently focused on the customer experience, but in aviation the focus has been about the passenger experience, not about the experience of the director of maintenance or operations. It wasn’t part of the discussion, but it is now; we’re driving a transaction that creates an experience rather than merely solving a problem.
We’ve started to think about orders and issues not as a series of individual transactions but as a continuous process from start to finish. We’ve gotten some really nice feedback on customer-satisfaction scores, which have increased from the mid 60s in December 2019 to over 90 in September 2020.
How has the pandemic affected regional customer-support teams?
The regional presence of our teams is a big component of our customer-support strategies, having teams from both customer service and technical support in-region is one of those key enablers along with the digital strategy. Meeting face to face, getting onsite, really understanding, and making and building those relationships was key. Covid changed some of those behaviors, of course. We have leveraged technology like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to do that during this time. And we’ve found that we’re able to accomplish a lot, if not everything, from doing that.
We were on a journey around digital transformation, and the pandemic absolutely accelerated it. As we move forward, we will begin to weave back in the face-to-face engagements as appropriate. There is a time and place for those, especially having a technician onsite to work directly with the customer’s technical and engineering teams. We have been creative with using video to help work through various issues, so I don’t think we’ll ever return to the same level of travel and onsite engagement. We won’t go 100 percent digital, but face-to-face interactions will be with specific agendas. We can get greater reach and greater frequency using video chat.
The combination of the regional teams—which provide in-country, face-to-face support when required—and a digital strategy that enables customers to self-serve and access as needed, is one of the differentiators where we're driving now.
What can customers at major corporations and operators look for from Honeywell in the upcoming months?
Coming out of Covid shutdowns and getting their fleets back up and running, they’re looking for us to deliver on our commitments. Customers have a lot of work they need to do, and in some cases, they now have fewer people to do it. So, we’ll be leveraging what we can do on the portal, developing machine-to-machine technologies to help them reduce their overhead, and driving integration through the technology so that we can reduce cycle time. We’re looking to eliminate manual transactions, reduce errors, and partner with our customers to bring this together.
I'm working with our whole aerospace team to communicate what we're going to do, follow through, and deliver on these commitments. We’ll see some hiccups as airlines come back into service and there will always be technical issues to be solved, but making sure that we're doing what we're saying we’re going to do is going to be very important. At the end of the day, customers will remember how we reacted and whether we made sure we're resolving their problems. We'll continue to build our technologies but focusing on the engagement at the customer level and making sure we deliver will be key.