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The ARINCDirect service launched officially on April 1st, 2003. Yes, that was April Fool’s Day, but we were definitely not fooling around. We had been working on it for over two years, and in fact a small group writing a business plan emerged from a meeting room at 11am on September 11th, 2001 to find that aviation and the world had changed while we were meeting. We kept working on our idea, and began full-scale development at the beginning of 2002.
Our idea was that the business aviation community deserved to have some competition among service providers. There was at the time just one company that provided datalink for the majority of business aircraft, and we aimed to be the second one, and to be better. We’d like to think that we’ve succeeded, but if you think differently, please give us feedback for improvement.
Our service in 2003 was a faint outline of the wide variety of services that ARINCDirect offers today. What we had from day one, though, was datalink, flight planning, filing, weather briefings, and a 24x7 flight operations center. Those aspects continue today.
Speaking of a desire to “be better,” we undertook a process called a “service readiness review” and part of that was writing a quality plan. Our consultant used a methodology called “quality function deployment” for that, and it boiled down to “answer the phones and keep the systems up.” Immediately after launch, we added our own third item: “respond quickly to feedback.”
From the beginning, our phone statistics were the envy of other call centers, with low or no hold times even as volume increased dramatically. And while we had occasional system and software problems when the service was young, we had a motivated engineering team to make things better. Finally, from the start, we wanted customer feedback to get a response from a human within one business day. We instituted a meeting every weekday morning to go over, as a group, ALL the feedback received since the last meeting. Those meetings continue to this day.
That third item, your feedback, has made the biggest difference in the shape of our service. You, our customers, have been the best source of ideas for improvement, and we are very grateful to you for taking time to help make our service better.
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