NAVBLUE's CSAT soars with Freshworks

NAVBLUE is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Airbus. NAVBLUE's mission is to provide industry-leading software & services to our 450 airline and aviation customers worldwide while helping to enhance the safety and efficiency of air transport. 

With its footprint across the globe, NAVBLUE's support teams are spread across France, UK, Canada, Sweden, China, Thailand, Ukraine, Tunisia, and India. Many of NAVBLUE's services are operationally and safety-critical to its airline customers, making reliable, 24/7 support just as essential. 

The background

When it was formed in 2016 (a result of Navtech's acquisition by Airbus), NAVBLUE's support organization needed to bring together its legacy units seamlessly as well. At the time, customers were presented with a confusing array of over 25 different support email addresses and phone numbers, depending on the product or service that they required help with. 

In our conversation with Justin Neale, VP, Customer Experience, he said, "Internally, the tools being used to track customer issues were inconsistent, and there wasn't a common view of all the issues a customer may have. This hampered our teams' abilities to collaborate and effectively meet the customers' needs."

The decision was therefore made in late 2017 to harmonize and simplify support for all NAVBLUE products and services. A new Customer Experience organization was created, and one of the first actions was to conduct a comprehensive market analysis to find a solution provider that would support the company's aspirations to transform customer support. 

Justin also said that many of the solutions reviewed required significant professional services support for the implementation. He revealed, "A key part of our strategy was to deploy a solution that we could rapidly adapt ourselves as our customers and our own internal needs evolved".  

An analysis of their current tickets also showed an interesting and important trend - that over 60% of all queries were knowledge related. With this in mind, a significant focus of the solution review was the knowledge base capabilities. 

Taking off with Freshworks

The Freshdesk customer service platform was selected in January 2018 based primarily on its ease of use and flexibility. This was apparent right from the start. Justin made this impressive point, "A small project team was used to implement Freshdesk, comprising of only 2 people and the initial setup and configuration work was completed in just 2 months from contract signature to customer go-live".  

Freshdesk's agility was another critical factor that swayed the decision in its favor. As Justin said, "Our customers were heavily involved during the deployment and the ease of configuration meant that many suggested changes or improvements received during the initial customer cutovers could be made in real-time. This agile approach was a crucial factor in our successful rollout. " 

The simple interface also meant that the internal adoption of the solution was painless. Minimal training for support teams was needed and the ease of internal & customer collaboration quickly demonstrated benefits in terms of ticket resolution time and customer satisfaction.  

Customer satisfaction soars

Soon after the initial deployment of Freshdesk, NAVBLUE extended the association with Freshworks further with (Freshcaller (now Freshdesk Contact Center)), the call center on the cloud. Integrating the telephony solution directly into the support portal further simplified the workflow for support teams and made all information from the customer visible in one place.  

The way forward? Setting the bar higher. In Justin's words, "It has now been just over two years since making the switch to Freshworks and the focus on continuous improvement has not changed.  The volume of data available through the support system has enabled targeted changes and improvements to be made every week. This may be the release of a new knowledge base article or launching a new customer forum to get our customers involved in shaping the products and services of the future".  

As a truly customer-centric organization, feedback continually informs the way NAVBLUE works. With every ticket, service agents make it a point to ask customers to rate their performance. Listening and improving constantly is what makes NAVBLUE the powerhouse that it is.

New initiatives on the horizon

It's onward and upward for NAVBLUE as Justin expresses his excitement for what teams can bring in the future to enhance customer support further. The next destination for NAVBLUE's support organization is to introduce seamless and effective self-service with AI bots. "We're also looking at how we can embed support access directly into our products," finished Justin.