The January 2024 Aviation Consumer article focused on tips for choosing the right shop, and here we’ll turn the tables and look at what it takes to be a good customer.
That’s because at a time where long schedule lead times have become the norm, it is ever more important to forge positive relations with your shop. Imagine this scenario: You’re loaded for the long-planned family vacation, hit the starter switch and the plane won’t start. You need your shop right now.
Do you want to be viewed as the guy who never pays his bills on time or a great customer? Whether it’s a major upgrade or getting speedy service on a repair that has grounded your airplane, how a shop views you as a customer can have profound implications on what comes next.
Evolution of learning
Over my 37 years of aircraft ownership, I’ve run the gamut from being a sorely uninformed penny-pincher to an astute client and learned—ask not what your maintenance shop can do for you, ask what you can do for your maintenance shop. The old saw that says, “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself,” is worth pondering.
My ownership journey began in 1987 with a $10,000 Cessna 172. I will never forget telling my military test-pilot brother that buying the plane was easy, but maintaining it is hard. In the beginning, every penny spent mattered. Owner-assisted annuals were the norm and I’ve been through 28 of them. It was an evolution of learning the true value of a good shop and how to cultivate a fruitful relationship.
As one example, I used Lancaster Avionics in 2002 to install some avionics upgrades that included a King GPS, navcomm and S-TEC autopilot in my Tiger. The plane never had to go back to Lancaster for any repair work to those upgrades over 17 years—the only shop I ever used with a perfect track record of quality workmanship.
Numerous bad experiences over the years tempered judgment as well. Premium tradecraft work comes with a premium price tag, and as you might expect, in the intervening time, I went to several other avionics shops for upgrades. But in every instance I had to go back for repairs to their work. In 2010, a Maryland-based avionics shop did an upgrade and roughly six months down the road things went wrong. The shop didn’t stand behind its work and I had to engage Lancaster Avionics to fix the substandard work—none of which creates goodwill on either side of the equation. But when I was planning a serious ($70,000) full-panel upgrade, there was only one shop, in my mind, whose work was beyond reproach—regardless of cost—and Lancaster Avionics got my job. If you’ve had similar experiences with other good shops, we want to hear about it.
What is a good customer?
Using my experience with Lancaster as an example, like most shops with a solid reputation it schedules between three and six months in advance for major installation work and up to three weeks for repair work. I approached Lancaster’s principal, Todd Adams, to help us all understand a top shop’s perspective on customers.
Adams rightfully pointed out that shops exist to make money—period. Customers that facilitate a shop’s ability to make money ultimately are good customers. But what does this mean? A lot, but it isn’t as straightforward as many aircraft owners may think.
“It’s not the size of the job, the length of the relationship or amount of money collected that makes them a good customer. So many times, as a shop owner, I hear these examples as a basis for defining a good customer when it’s actually much more than that. These things can be a partial basis for defining a good customer, but it is not the entire picture,” he told me. Adams made a bullet point checklist of good-customer characteristics that’s worth sharing.
- Prompt payments: In any business, money is the grease that keeps the cogs turning. Unless alternate terms are well-established, you’re expected to pay upon delivery.
- Good communication: Good customers can clearly articulate problems or desires, can listen and follow instructions, but don’t overcommunicate.
- Steady customer: These are loyal patrons to the business. The size of the job is irrelevant, but what is a factor is when the customer is consistent with small jobs, but then takes the big job somewhere else and worse, comes back to get it fixed. When this happens, you can bet there will be no good-customer discount and it will be like starting from scratch.
- Promotes the business: If a shop is fortunate to have a customer base that recommends the shop to others, the shop does not have to spend time and money advertising.
- On time: A good customer is on time for scheduled appointments (barring issues beyond control like weather and aircraft failure). If you can’t make the appointment as scheduled, it’s time to be a good communicator.
- Pay your bill: It is the shop’s responsibility to provide quality work. A good shop will not charge for mistakes or learning curves (unless agreed in advance). A good customer will pay for all work.
- Speak up! A customer who is unhappy or has questions or concerns about something and speaks up about it is always appreciated. Shops are not mind readers; if the shop doesn’t know something is wrong, it has no opportunity to try and fix it.
Bottom line: If a customer is slow to pay, does not articulate squawks well, is never on time for appointments and always complains about the invoice, they could have been coming to a shop for 20 years but that doesn’t make them a good customer. The reality is that a big job with the wrong customer can end up costing a shop money, defeating the reason for working on the aircraft in the first place.
Benefits of being a good customer
In the process of graduating from penny-pincher novice to a good customer, and with Shearer Aviation my preferred maintenance shop of 12 years, I learned to occasionally go above and beyond by tipping $50 to $100 at the end of the job. A few years ago I arrived at the airport for a business trip only to find a nonfunctioning left brake. And since Grummans need brakes for differential steering, I was stuck. I made a call to the shop’s owner to see if he or a mechanic could come to my airport in the next couple of days to fix the brakes. He replied to just hang on, and 30 minutes later he landed in his Comanche with tools and parts in hand to work on my airplane. Two hours after I made the call, I was taking off for my meeting. That can only be labeled as exceptional customer service, and it punctuates what being a good customer can do for you. The several hundred dollars of tips over the years paid off tremendously when I needed service the most.
A few years later I graduated to astute client when, at the completion of my panel upgrade, I was given the option to pay the original invoice or because of the actual complexity of the project (175 estimated hours turned into 334 hours of actual labor) I could pay an additional good-faith amount of $4400. In the blink of an eye, I wrote the check for $4400.
I had visited the shop biweekly and saw firsthand the length, breadth and quality of the workmanship. The way I see it, when flying in IMC I can’t put a dollar value for savings on substandard work. Because I kept the relationship on the rails, the same shop supported me immediately with a replacement unit when the audio panel failed.
Two-way street
In today’s world, we all expect exceptionally good customer service from the various businesses we support. Rarely is the inverse of being a good customer even acknowledged. The success of a customer relationship is as dependent on the customer as it is on the shop providing the service. Yet, many customer/shop relationships are incredibly unbalanced. Maybe we don’t even notice because we’ve become acclimated (or insensitive) to how things work.
But having valuable, long-term relationships with customers is not just about how the shop or its employees behave. When customers behave badly or demand too much, they set the stage for a lousy relationship. That’s because business is about people, and relationships only work on a two-way street.
No pilot likes to be grounded by maintenance issues. But when it inevitably happens, you might find, as I have many times, that being a preferred customer and an astute client can pay big dividends.
