FBO Insight: Employee Empowerment: Securing Customer Loyalty on the Frontline
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Multi-Part Series on The 7 Immutable Elements of Building Equity in Your FBO Enterprise
The battle of winning customer trust and loyalty begins with frontline employees: those that interface directly with the customer on the ramp and at the front desk. This is your FBO’s ground zero!
Since the FBO owner or manager cannot be everywhere at once, empowering frontline employees is the top strategy to deliver an excellent customer experience, the third leg of our three-legged stool.
Employee empowerment is simply the process of treating all employees as true stakeholders in the operation. As a stakeholder, employees are naturally empowered because they have a direct interest, involvement, and investment in the outcome of each customer transaction. Their livelihoods depend on it.
When an employee is empowered as a stakeholder, they have a sense of pride in taking ownership of their responsibilities. Not only for their own best interests, but for the overall success of the entire enterprise. They become motivated to accomplish something meaningful.
An example is a CSR who has been empowered and trained to deal with disgruntled customers. They resolve issues at the point of transaction to a win-win outcome. This helps cement an enduring relationship, not only between the customer and the employee, but also the customer with the FBO.
Research indicates that up to 95 percent of customers will return if disputes and complaints are handled in a timely and thoughtful way.
Being empowered helps encourage trust and can turn an ordinary business transaction into a customer transformation. Through empowerment, the employee that has solved a problem or a dispute can be viewed by the customer as a source for a solution. You will have:
· A creative CSR
· A reliable line service technician
· A savvy accounting employee
Loyal customers seek out these kinds of employees on return trips. They know an empowered employee will not only take care of their business and professional needs, but also their most prized procession, their aircraft.
With this blog post, we conclude our series The 7 Immutable Elements of Building Equity in Your FBO Enterprise. Up next, we will roll out our crystal ball and take a look at what may lie ahead for the FBO industry as the Trump administration prepares to take office on January 20th.
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.