Tip of the Week: Keep Your Customers Close
/By John L. Enticknap and Ron R. Jackson
Aviation Business Strategies Group
In today’s competitive FBO working environment, there is perhaps no greater challenge than keeping your customers close and your fuel margins closer. For this blog post we’ll discuss the former with a follow-up blog next week regarding fuel margins.
At the NATA FBO Success Seminar in March, attended by more than 30 FBOs and sponsors from throughout the U.S. and Canada, we discussed how to attract customers and what you can do to keep them coming back.
One disturbing statistic we reviewed was that consumer research indicates that only one in 25 dissatisfied customers will actually tell you there is a problem. The rest leave without saying a word, perhaps never to be seen again.
That’s why it’s important to train your employees to develop a sixth sense in order to recognize when a customer has a bad service experience. You don’t want a customer leaving your FBO without resolving a dispute.
One of the keys to a successful customer service experience is to empower FBO employees to resolve all disputes at the point of transaction before a disagreement can blossom into something quite ugly. This is an important element we stress in our Don’t Forget the Cheese customer service training program.
We believe that taking care of customer disputes on the spot will turn an unfortunate transaction into a successful transformation, where both the customer and the employee have a chance to resolve an issue, find a solution and bond in the process. It can be a very cathartic experience.
Keeping your customers close is good business. Next week, we’ll discuss how keeping your fuel margins closer is good business sense.
About the bloggers:
John Enticknap has more than 35 years of aviation fueling and FBO services industry experience. Ron Jackson is co-founder of Aviation Business Strategies Group and president of The Jackson Group, a PR agency specializing in FBO marketing and customer service training. For more background, visit the biography page or www.absggroup.com.