Sun Never Sets on Honeywell Technical Support

“They really are a special breed,” Alcock continued. “This business attracts a people who are passionate about aviation and dedicated to customer service. They love to solve problems. They love to fix things. They get really excited when they see an aircraft on the ground situation resolved and that airplane take off on time.” 

Honeywell field service engineers are positioned strategically around the world so no matter when a customer reaches out for help – day or night – there’s always an experienced, knowledgeable field service engineer at the other end of the phone line or email message.

“We have a follow-the-sun virtual network that enables us to connect the customer with a qualified engineer at any time,” Alcock said. “The network helps us route customers to the engineer who’s best equipped to handle their problem. It also gives us the opportunity to handoff open cases to the next shift. A case that gets opened in the Americas may get handed over to someone in Asia, then to someone in Europe, so we’re able to keep things moving around the clock.”

Honeywell prides itself on responding quickly when customers reach out by phone, email, text or through the company’s recently revamped MyAerospace portal. Honeywell aims to resolve 90 percent of customer issues within 24 hours and achieve first-contact resolution rates well above the industry benchmark of 70-75 percent. Honeywell’s first-contact resolution numbers currently hover around 90 percent.

“First-contact resolution rate is one of three metrics we track in Customer & Product Support,” Alcock said. “The others are customer satisfaction and customer effort. We’re constantly monitoring our scores to measure our progress and look for improvement opportunities. We’ve seen our scores steadily improve, but of course we’re never truly satisfied.”

In October the field service team put a new priority implementation process in place to set expectations and improve customer communications. The process was implemented based on the advice of Honeywell’s unique Global Customer Committee. It helps Honeywell analyze the urgency of new cases and establishes a service-level agreement between Honeywell and the customer, which includes frequent touchpoints throughout the life of the case.

Other recent improvements include a callback function to reduce customer hold times, more self-help features on the customer portal, and an expanded Technical Support containing more than 8,000 searchable articles covering many of the most common topics of interest to business aviation operators. Coming in 2020 is a “bot” that will help customers get routine questions answered quicker.

“Some customers want to use the portal to reach field support and we’ve recently made significant improvements to make MyAerospace more robust and easier to use,” Alcock said. “Others want the more personal experience of being able to pick up the phone and talk directly to a field service engineer about their problem. Customer expectations are changing and we’re changing to reflect the way customers prefer to do business with Honeywell.”