Story ID: 801DassaultMRO
Dassault Steps Up Customer Service
By: Mark Huber
Caption: Score advances in AIN survey.
Word Count: 509
Dassault Falcon (Booth N6117) is taking a multi-pronged approach to improving its aftermarket support, by hiring more customer service representatives and technicians, expanding customer service centers, increasing parts inventories, opening more aircraft service centers, increasing mandatory service inspections/intervals and right-pricing parts.

Customers apparently are responding favorably to the changes as Dassault Falcon is scoring higher on AIN’s annual product support survey, scoring second only to Gulfstream overall and ranking first place in key categories such as authorized service centers and tech reps.

Geoff Chick, Dassault Falcon vice president of customer services, told attendees at an MRO seminar at NBAA 2015 that the company is making aggressive moves to improve customer service, including the appointment of new authorized service centers in China and Nigeria; adding another company-owned facility in Bordeaux, France, to relieve pressure on its Le Bourget facility; and expanding into the former Jet Aviation facility at Teterboro to provide line maintenance and AOG work.

“We’re looking to reduce downtime, reduce maintenance costs and improve availability,” Chick said. One way to do that is to change the calendar intervals for mandatory maintenance. Early next year the A-check on the Falcon 7X will be converted to a one-year/600-hour event, and that will also be extended to the Falcon 900 and 2000.

In addition, Chick said Dassault Falcon is building its catalog of online web videos and apps. Face-to-face, the Dassault Training Academy in Bordeaux has trained 500 technicians since 2007.

The company’s year-old Falcon Response initiative is not just its two Falcon 900s used to respond to AOGs, but the full complement of capabilities that can be employed to help customers: command centers, go teams and airborne support, if needed. “When you combine those things together, that's Falcon Response,” said Chick.

The command centers are located in Paris, Teterboro, N.J., and Boise, Idaho, and one is always running to answer calls. “We follow the sun,” he said. New this year, each command center has a “spares point of contact” to expedite the AOG process. Chick noted that Dassault Falcon will add two new go teams to the U.S. next year–in Chicago and Denver.

Meanwhile, Dassault Falcon is opening a new regional parts distribution center next month in Louisville, Ky., a location within 300 miles of 25 percent of its U.S. customers, according to director of spares Eric Smith. Another regional center is planned for Lagos, Nigeria.

The French aircraft manufacturer has also made numerous improvements to its support policies over the last five years, Smith said. This includes free shipping on cores returned within 10 days; eliminated tool rental charges for weekend days; expanded regional distribution network beyond Teterboro and Le Bourget, opening up regional distribution centers in Singapore, Beijing and Brazil; applied right-sized pricing to more than 45,000 parts to reduce customer costs; began external customer surveys; gave customers credits for parts that were defective on arrival or were no-fault-found parts; and increased the overall customer service satisfaction level to 98.5 percent.