FBO Insight: Do you know what your employees are thinking?

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FBO Insights: Do you know what your employees are thinking?

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FBO owners, operators and managers spend countless hours conducting and analyzing customer surveys to get a better perspective on how well they are delivering a good customer service experience.

But what about internal customers, the employees? Shouldn’t their input be just as important, just as critical in developing the customer experience? After all, employees are on the frontline, making direct customer contact. They are true stakeholders in the organization.

To get a full understanding of what employees are thinking, we recommend an internal survey in order to gather a seasoned and savvy perspective from the people that live and breathe the customer experience every day.  

With the right employee survey tool, FBOs can also find insight that will help them operate their enterprises more effectively and efficiently and will aid in developing meaningful messages to help shape the customer narrative.

The results of an internal employee survey may also surprise and even astonish. It’s like peeling back an onion, uncovering and revealing layers of useful information.

We’ve used internal employee surveys to help FBOs craft both internal and external communications as well as develop a company’s vision, mission, corporate responsibility and industry positioning. A side benefit of asking employees their opinions is job enrichment where employees feel their opinions count and they are contributing to the successful outcome of the enterprise.  

The following are suggested survey questions to ask employees. We recommend the survey responses be anonymous so that employees feel free to provide honest, unfiltered answers. In addition, FBOs may want to have a third party administer the survey to further add anonymity to the process.

  1. What makes your FBO a good FBO?

  2. What value-added/extra services does your FBO offer its customers?(Services that make your FBO a better place for customers)

  3. What other services do you think your FBO should offer?

  4. Please give us your evaluation of the following: What are your FBOs:
    -Strengths?
    -Weaknesses?

  5. If you could change one thing about your FBO, what would it be?

  6. What have you heard customers say about your FBO, good and bad?

  7. What steps do you take to ensure your customer’s needs are met?

  8. How do you like working for your FBO?

  9. What do you see in the near future for change within your FBO?

  10. In the next three years, list your FBOs greatest opportunity for growth?

  11. In the next three years, what do you think will emerge as your FBOs biggest threat?

  12. What issues do you think your company must address or overcome in order to be more successful?

  13. What’s working well for your FBO?
    What’s Not?

  14. What are the qualities that differentiate you from other FBOs?

  15. What are the biggest gripes you hear from your customers?

  16. What are the biggest gripes you hear from your internal customers (bosses, other employees?)

  17. What would you like to do to help your FBO be more successful?

  18. In your opinion, how do you keep customers?

  19. How do you lose them?

In our next blog, we’ll peel back the onion even further when we discuss the last two survey questions to ask employees. These two final questions are designed to be an exercise in perception vs. reality where we ask employees to rate a series of FBO attributes in terms of importance and also from a customer’s perspective.

We’ve had clients who thought they had an excellent perspective of what their employees were thinking, only to find out it wasn’t based in reality.

© 2025 ABSG/TJG

Please leave any comments you have about this blog post below. If you have any questions, please send us an email: John Enticknap, jenticknap@bellsouth.net,  Ron Jackson,  ronjacksongroup@gmail.com.

ABOUT THE BLOGGERS: John Enticknap is the founder of Aviation Business Strategies Group (ABSG). He has more than 35 years of aviation fueling and FBO services industry experience and is an IS-BAH Accredited auditor. Ron Jackson is co-founder of ABSG and president of The Jackson Group (TJG), a PR agency specializing in FBO marketing and customer service training. Visit the biography page or absggroup.com for more background.