Customer Service Can Help Improve An Organization

  • Published
  • By Kayla Prather
  • 932nd Airlift Wing Public Affairs

The maintenance operations officer for the Maintenance Group at the 932nd Airlift Wing, Capt. Aaron Wolfe, shared his insights on the Air Force Reserve as well as how customer service plays a major role in all they do.

“I work over at the aircraft maintenance production. Our main job is to ensure that we have four planes in our fleet-they’re the C-40’s executive airlift-so we’re a fly on-demand mission,” said Wolfe. “We have to keep jets ready with no maintenance issues at all times and I oversee that.”

Wolfe stated that there is also scheduled maintenance that has to happen every so often. There is also unscheduled maintenance when things break on an airplane. He said they make sure they are diligent and keep the aircraft up in the air and going.

 “I think this is an amazing base with amazing folks. I know there’s been a lot of turnover with leadership,” said Wolfe. “There’s a lot of new faces which is really a good thing because it brings in new and fresh ideas, which causes us to progress and continue to get better.”

Wolfe also shared how he feels where he works can improve and how to tie in customer service to that.

“There’s always areas for improvement. I’ve worked in the corporate world for retail, so one of my main focuses is customer service,” said Wolfe. “Do we do customer service well? I don’t think we think about how we do our business in a customer service style. Our customers here at the maintenance group is the operations group: pilots.”

Wolfe added they have to make sure the customers always have what they need.

“There’s three gradable dynamics and that’s the clean, fast and friendly rules,” said Wolfe. “Those are the metrics that the business is judged by and we can use the same tools here.”

He showed how these are relevant by asking the questions: Do we provide a clean aircraft for our pilots to fly and our customers to fly on? Do we provide a personality of being friendly and a servant of leadership? Do we do our business in an efficient manner? Wolfe stated all of those questions fall into the clean, fast and friendly rules.

Wolfe expressed how customer service could lead to reforming the organization in a positive way as well as creating strong leaders.

“I think folks maybe don’t see how applicable being customer driven is into our actual business here in the military,” said Wolfe. “If we can maybe look at how we provide customer service and who are our customers, it’s almost comparable to a retail world. To focus on that I think there could actually be positive change derived.”

He said the founder of the particular company he worked for went by a quote that stated, ‘A customer is the ultimate boss and can fire everybody from the individual running the register all the way to the CEO or the board member by simply shopping at different place.’

“Our customers aren’t necessarily going to shop at another place,” said Wolfe. “However, if we work in that same mentality, the only thing that will derive from that is a better experience, better leadership, more efficiency and just an all-around better business model.”