If you have had an opportunity to call on us for support since our Aerospace restructuring effort in mid-2005, I hope you will have experienced some of the substantial improvements made by the Customer & Product Support team that I lead. Our focus has been on simplifying and improving the support that we provide to you.
As part of a multi-year investment program in our customer care infrastructure, we are leveraging technology in order to create a series of options for our customers on how they can access and obtain support and advice on our portfolio of aerospace products. One such program we’re working on is our Intelligent Call Routing (ICR) system that is designed to improve our responsiveness to customers’ Aircraft-On-Ground (AOG) needs.
I recently attended the National Business Aviation Association event in Orlando, Florida, and met with many customers. Customers were generally in an upbeat mood reflecting the growth and renewed confidence within our industry. We received some very positive feedback about the progress we’re making in customer service, but our customers still experience frustration when trying to navigate our phone prompt system, especially when they are faced with a grounded aircraft or urgent situation.
Using this new ICR technology, we’re designing a system that will eliminate the phone prompt complexities and allow our customers to reach the Customer Care representatives easier and faster. Eventually we plan to eliminate the phone prompt system altogether.
With the new ICR system, customers will hear the very first phone prompt ask them to select “AOG” or “Other” when they call into our 1-800 Customer Care number. After selecting AOG, the customer enters in their six-digit identification number and gets routed to an available customer service representative. During this phone transfer, detailed information about this customer’s fleet, call history, current orders and repair status is displayed on the applicable customer support representative’s computer screen.
While this sounds simple, we still have a lot of work ahead of us! We’ve asked our key stakeholders to participate in customer focus groups and interview sessions so we can gather their feedback and any additional design requirements for the ICR system. Although we are still collecting feedback, our goal is to integrate the additional design requirements into the ICR production design by the first quarter of 2007.
Because the six-digit number may not be ideal for some of our customers to access the customer care organization, we’re looking at other alternatives. One alternative is to develop a caller-id matching function that includes customer cell phone numbers, or a speech recognition system that asks for the company and caller’s name before routing customers to a customer service representative. It’s still work-in-progress but each change we implement is taking us another step forward in making it easier and better for our customers.
I will continue to update you on our ICR progress but in the meantime, I invite you to share your comments and feedback on your experiences with phone prompt and speech recognition systems.
