Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics (NYSE: GD), designs, develops, manufactures, markets, services and supports the world’s most technologically advanced business-jet aircraft. Gulfstream has produced some 1,800 aircraft for customers around the world since 1958. To meet the diverse transportation needs of the future, Gulfstream offers a comprehensive fleet of aircraft, and also offers aircraft ownership services via Gulfstream Financial Services Division and Gulfstream Pre-Owned Aircraft Sales®. The company employs more than 9,700 people at seven major locations.
Pursuing Exceptional Service Excellence
The Gulfstream brand is essentially synonymous with the best of the best in business-jet aircraft products and services. However, maintaining consistently high standards of excellence across seven locations and multiple product and service lines involving almost 10,000 employees presents a massive challenge. Gulfstream customers know they are dealing with the best, so they expect to have an exceptional experience during every interaction they have with the company. For this reason, when Gulfstream executives became aware of possible gaps in customer service performance, they responded swiftly and proactively.
“We became aware of some customer service issues that had developed when planes were in for service,” said Scott McDonald, Director of East Coast Sales for Gulfstream. “Some customers felt like they weren’t being kept adequately informed about the status or nature of their aircraft’s service program. We became concerned that our brand identity could suffer if we didn’t find and fix the problem in a way that would provide customers with a high level of clarity and confidence in the way we were handling their needs. We immediately started searching for a training partner who would collaborate with us to create just the right solution to address our desired outcomes.”
Baker Communications – Working Together to Create the Best Strategy
Gulfstream immediately reached out to Baker Communications. “I had been aware of Baker Communications for some time,” explained McDonald. “I had met Michael Brichford (Senior Director of Strategic Accounts at Baker) while I was exploring a previous training opportunity. Although that one didn’t pan out, Michael continued to stay in touch with me, regularly updating me on new training initiatives at Baker and checking to see if there was anything he could help me with. When we decided to launch a customer service training program at Gulfstream, we knew we needed to work with the best of the best. I contacted Michael right away.”
Greg Byrnes, Vice President of Sales and New Business Development at Gulfstream, met with Brichford at the Baker corporate office in Houston, where they extensively reviewed options for creating an Exceptional Customer Service training program for Gulfstream employees. The meeting was very productive. “After the meeting, Greg called me and said ‘I think we found our new training partner,’” said McDonald.
Gulfstream ultimately booked training events at multiple sites, beginning with their Savannah flagship facility.
Not Wilbur and Orville’s Customer Service Training
The Baker team quickly realized that a standard off-the-shelf training class was not the answer for Gulfstream. Instead, they decided to begin by extensively researching the Gulfstream culture and service process, so they could customize a solution that would preserve and enhance the Gulfstream brand going forward.
Jer Dunlap was attached as the Baker senior instructor for the project, and his first step was to visit the Savannah site and shadow the Gulfstream members on the floor for several days in order to get a feel for the challenges they were facing. After Jer concluded his site evaluation, he met with Gulfstream leaders for two days, during which time he presented the data and recommendations from his research. The group then brainstormed with Jer to finalize a comprehensive strategy to address the challenges and opportunities Jer had identified.
Dunlap’s recommendations focused on two distinct performance gaps. “One of the main things Jer identified was the need for greater teamwork between all of the working groups,” McDonald explained. “In any organization, there is a tension between sales and operations; operations sometimes feels like sales cares about the money more than the customer, and sales sometimes gets upset because they think operations makes too many mistakes and doesn’t take responsibility.”
To address this problem, Jer broke down the organizational silos, bringing sales, customer service representatives, technicians and even people from finance together to focus on improving cooperation and communication. The main purpose of these sessions was to help everyone understand all the perspectives and challenges each team was dealing with, so they could start working together as one big team with a single goal in mind; deliver the best possible experience to the customer during all phases of the customer interaction.
The second major gap Dunlap identified focused on developing skills to communicate effectively with customers and provide them with assurance that their concerns had been heard and their needs would be met.
“One of our main goals for the training was to make sure that when we make mistakes, we recovered properly and promptly,” said McDonald. “Don’t let it fester – address it immediately; let the customer give their side and empathize with them, and then do whatever we can to make it right.”
Beyond that important step, however, Dunlap helped the team develop a proactive approach to avoid repeating the problem in the future. From Gulfstream’s point of view, while resolving the customer issue is very important, it is equally important to get the details about what happened and who was involved so that after the current customer need is addressed, the team can go back and show how they fixed the problem in a way that makes sure it doesn’t happen again.
“The hardest thing to do is admit when you got something wrong; no one wants to take ownership.” McDonald explained. “We want our team members to not be afraid to admit when they made mistakes. Instead, own up to it with the customer and then work through the process of making it right in a way that keeps them in the loop and helps them understand what is going on every step of the way, until the problem is solved.”
As a result of the training, Gulfstream now has a process in place to track every customer issue and document every step of the engagement process to assure that all bases have been covered. This process guarantees that customers will receive the exceptional customer service experience they have come to expect from the Gulfstream brand.
Baker-branded Excellence
Not only was Gulfstream pleased with the outcome of the training, they were also impressed with the commitment the Baker team demonstrated to delivering the outcomes Gulfstream needed.
“I have dealt with a lot of training companies over the years, and sometimes it gets a little aggravating,” declared McDonald. “A lot of them don’t want to cater to your business. We are very unique business – selling service to private aircraft. When we compete we are normally the highest, because we are the best. The Baker team came in and took the time to create a solution that was tailored to our needs, instead of handing us something off the shelf. Baker took the time to understand who we are and what drives our success, and fed that all back into the training, and that made all the difference.”
“In my experience, this attitude is very rare,” McDonald continued. “The Baker team is top shelf; I can’t stress that enough or say it often enough. What they delivered for us was of the highest quality, and it exceeded our expectations in every way.”