Wynn Parrish, B/E Aerospace

SuperNova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Company

B/E Aerospace is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of interior products and solutions for commercial, business, and military aircraft. It designs and manufactures aircraft passenger seating for 40 percent of the Worldwide Commercial Seating Market. B/E Aerospace’s customers include the world’s top airlines, such as Air France, British Airways, Emirates Airlines, Lufthansa, and United.

The Problem

B/E Aerospace formed a Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) team to monitor in-service performance, provide timely visibility into issues, and proactively stop emerging problems from escalating (ex.: seats not fully reclining, tray tables breaking, headrests not in place). The VOC team initially tackled these goals by manually sorting through log pages – books that are kept in all aircraft that record in-flight problems and resulting maintenance work. The challenge was that there were more than two million log pages of customer feedback to process each month and the team was only able to manually process a mere 0.5%. It was losing out on valuable information, and the insights it did receive were coming in so late that any effort to contain the damage and control costs were unsuccessful. 

The Solution

Wynn Parrish, Vice President of Product Support,  knew that throwing more people at the problem would not be a viable long-term solution and that B/E Aerospace needed to make a drastic change, take a risk, and do something that NONE of its competitors were doing. B/E Aerospace looked toward its customers – the airlines, who are pioneers in implementing VOC programs – to glean best practices and strategies to better form its own VOC initiative. Becoming the first manufacturer in the industry to adopt a strategic, end-to-end VOC program (powered by sentiment and text analytics), B/E Aerospace not only experienced monumental business benefits for itself, but it disrupted the entire industry by changing the expectations of its customers.  

The Results

So how exactly did this project disrupt an entire industry?

1) The VOC program changed the way airline interior manufacturers, such as B/E Aerospace, work in that it set the new standard for how manufacturers should build and proactively maintain interior components. For B/E Aerospace, the VOC program impacted its entire business model, the way it approached product design, how it looked at warranty spending, and its vendor relationships.

Since the program launched, B/E Aerospace analyzes more than 150,000 pages of customer-feedback data each month (this is an increase of more than 1500%). With this data, the VOC team can identify issues that are statistically relevant and proactively address situations from growing out of control thereby reducing maintenance costs for the airline and limiting its own financial exposure, while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction. B/E Aerospace has since proactively and unabashedly informed airlines exactly what problems have arisen on existing products along with the actions they have taken to mitigate the concerns. One might think this to be an unwise business move, but it has transformed and strengthened the company’s relationships with its customers. The candid transparency has built trust and made the airlines confident that they are getting the highest quality and most reliable product possible, which helps to control their downstream maintenance costs. It has changed what airlines expect from their vendors.

2) The VOC program has changed the way airlines view log data and other forms of customer feedback – using it not only to improve their own operations, but to improve the operations of their vendors as well.

By providing logpage data to suppliers like B/E Aerospace, airlines are creating stronger, more transparent relationships and minimizing the lag time between a reported problem and when the supplier is notified. The information is at the suppliers’ fingertips. They can act on issues in real time and alleviate problems before they become major concerns – sometimes before the airline even knows about it! For example, B/E Aerospace’s VOC team presented an airline customer with a short list of issues that had the potential to escalate into larger concerns – and the airline was not even aware of half of them! B/E Aerospace saved the airline money on maintenance fees and helped them be “on their game” by providing a comfortable, issue-free environment for passengers. Airlines enjoy the benefits of improved brand reputation and lowered maintenance costs. B/E Aerospace enjoys the benefits of reduced warranty exposure and a stronger customer partnership.

3) Finally, the VOC program has benefited the airline industry for the betterment of the passengers – yes, folks like you and me – by creating a more comfortable in-flight experience. By tracking and trending issues in real time and proactively working to rectify them – either on one plane, a particular fleet, or across multiple airlines – airlines and their interior manufacturers are rectifying problems before they get out of hand and preventing them from happening on similar products (seats, tables, headrests, etc. in other aircrafts) before the issues even emerge.

For example, in B/E Aerospace’s case, the VOC team identified a spike in the number of headrest complaints (“headrest loose,” “headrest missing,” etc.). Looking further into the issue, the team found that the cleaning crews were taking them off to clean, but not fastening them back on properly. With these findings, the B/E Aerospace engineers created a design that made headrests more intuitive for the untrained cleaning crews to install correctly, while maintaining the aerospace requirement that it be impossible for passengers to remove them, all while not compromising passenger comfort. The result: Complaints dropped by 97% and this particular problem has disappeared from the logpages.

The Technology

Clarabridge Intelligent Text and Sentiment Analytics

B/E Aerospace chose Clarabridge’s intelligent text and sentiment analytics solution suite to power its VOC program. It allows the company to efficiently collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback data. The Clarabridge suite leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) to break down unstructured data to sentence and clause level by understanding relationships between words. For example, if someone reports, “the headrest is loose on seat 22E and the reading light doesn’t turn on,” the NLP engine understands that “loose” relates to “headrest” and “doesn’t turn on” relates to “reading light.”

B/E Aerospace takes the NLP engine one step further. If someone reports, “the headrest is loose on seat 22E,” the NLP engine is able to map seat 22E to its exact physical location in the airline’s interior layout. B/E Aerospace’s product support engineers can then identify the exact model and design of seat 22E and compare it to similar designs across fleets. They can spot systemic design issues and conduct comparative analysis to understand if problems pertain to a certain regions, airlines, or aircrafts. Even if planes move between airlines, the issues can be recorded, tracked, and trended over time.

The VOC team can also analyze ad-hoc issues in real time. If an airline engineer calls with a question about a specific problem, a team member can immediately access the data and identify the underlying issues at hand.      

The technology allows the team to rapidly identify the scope of issues and strategically respond to emerging reliability concerns. Without this solution, B/E Aerospace would have to incur huge costs to fix small issues that morphed into huge disasters simply because they weren’t identified early enough.  

Metrics

What is interesting about B/E Aerospace’s VOC program is that the results are very tangible – problems are either fixed or they are not fixed. For that reason, the B/E Aerospace has experienced some very impressive metrics. Since the VOC program was implemented: 

• The VOC team now analyzes more than 150,000 pages of feedback data a month – an increase of 1500% from before adopting sentiment and text analytics technology.
• B/E Aerospace has seen dramatic performance improvements

• 97% reduction in headrests issues
• 65% reduction in tray table issues
• 45% reduction in literature pocket issues
• 35% reduction in legrest issues
• 30% reduction in recline issues
• Warranty spending has declined by more than 75%.
• Sales revenue has tripled.

Disruptive Factor

B/E Aerospace has changed the way airline suppliers and manufacturers use customer feedback data to proactively identify, track and resolve problems. It has changed the way airlines look at their supplier relationships; increasing transparency and trust through the sharing of customer data to not only improve their own operations, but the operations of their supplier partners. And it has improved the in-flight experience for the passengers, which is ultimately the end goal for airlines and their vendor partners – to ensure the traveler experience is one of excellence.

Shining Moment

While we’ve used this application to talk about the implications of B/E Aerospace’s VOC program to the airline industry as a whole, the company also has countless stories to illustrate its own successes.

In one case, the VOC team found a spike in complaints around airline tray tables (“tables warped,” “tables damaged,” “tables bubbled,” etc). When it dug into the data, it found a unique correlation. The problems were isolated, not to a specific airline, but to a specific region in the world – China. No other airline, flying the exact same product, had any reported issues. Yet, EVERY airline in China flying the product had, not one or two, but hundreds of reported issues! The problem was an epidemic- but why was it a localized one? 

The actual cause was from a cultural nuance – food in China is served very hot, on metal or ceramic dishes, directly onto the tray tables- no placemats; no insulating trays. In the past, the response would have been to blame the airline for violating the temperature range suitable for the tray tables.  But B/E Aerospace understands that such insight gives them the opportunity to provide more innovative products tailored to customer needs. As a result, it has redesigned the table to withstand the elevated temperatures and now specify those tables for all China-based airlines.