Honeywell Aims to Make Things Easy for Customers

Whether you’re a business jet pilot, aircraft owner, director of maintenance, frontline mechanic or purchasing manager, Todd Owens has a message for you: “We want to make it fast, seamless and extremely easy for customers to do business with Honeywell.”

“Whether they need to solve an aircraft on the ground issue, order a part, track progress on a repair or just ask a question about one of our products, we’re here and eager to help,” said Owens, Vice President of Customer & Product Support for the Americas. “No problem is too big or too small for our global team of technical support experts.”

Honeywell did a lot of research and worked closely with the Global Customer Committee (GCC) to uncover ways to improve customer interactions. “The GCC is a direct link between Honeywell the customer community,” Owens said. “GCC members – about 100 worldwide – provide critical feedback and make sure we’re addressing technical issues that have the greatest impact on their operations.”

Feedback also comes from customers attending Honeywell Operators Conferences, which are staged in locations throughout the world. The company will host about 50 conferences in the Americas in 2020, up from around 40 in 2019.

“We listened to our customers and have revamped the Operators Conferences to include fewer general sessions and more small-group meetings on specific technical topics,” said Owens. “We’re also introducing a ‘Customer Wing’ at the conferences, which is essentially a real-time help desk where customers can talk one-on-one with a Honeywell technical expert about whatever is on their minds.”

After all, customers are the “North Star” for Honeywell and other successful companies, he added. “Regardless of industry, people prefer to do business with companies that provide great customer service, are there when they’re needed and make it easy to transact business.”

Despite having a century-long record of customer responsiveness, Honeywell chose to almost totally reinvent its aftermarket support approach over the last five years. The company has actively leveraged technology with dedicated operator and pilot applications and a new, more capable customer portal. At the same time, Honeywell has changed its approach to technical support by making it easier for customers to talk directly with a field service engineer.

“We recognize that some customers prefer to do business online, so we’ve made the Honeywell Aerospace portal simpler and more intuitive,” Owens said. “We’ve improved the transactional aspects of the portal so customers can place and track orders for parts and repairs, find technical information and publications, reach out to the tech support team, and so much more.”

For example, Honeywell added a knowledge library, containing more than 8,000 articles written by field service engineers and other technical experts. The company also updated the Direct Access mobile app to make it easier for customers to find the right Honeywell technical expert and enabled a “search and find” capability on the portal to help customers locate their assigned field service engineer.

Field service engineers are based in locations around the world, which creates an “always on” capability enabling customers to reach out via phone, email, text or app, 24/7/365, Owens noted. “We recently added direct lines to enable Latin American customers to reach field service reps who speak Spanish and Portuguese. Our goal is to enable customers to contact us and conduct business in their own preferred way. Many customers have long-standing relationships with their FSE and we don’t want to interrupt those associations, which in some cases have been formed over the course of years or even decades.”

He’s quick to credit Honeywell’s global network of technical support professionals for the progress the company has made in recent years. “We have a very dedicated team that is committed to continuous improvement and has a passion for making customers’ lives easier.”