Excerpted from Business Aircraft Utilization Strategies (PDF)

To make the machines that make hot dogs and sausages -- machines that run morning, noon and night for years at a clip -- you have to visit your customers and learn from them, on their turf. In Des Moines, they make the machines that make hot dogs. Townsend Engineering makes industrial strength food processors. David Hamblin (right, second from left), a pleasant gentleman with an English accent, is Townsend’s director of engineering and the chief designer of many of the company’s machines. Today, Hamblin and a team of engineers are headed out from Des Moines to Mississippi to check on a newly installed model. A checkup, Hamblin reports, can be an all day affair or just a few hours. Today’s customer visit took half the day. "We visit customers quite often. We need to see our machinery at work in their plant. That can take two or three days if we’re working on the machine, adjusting and so on. Often it’s just two or three hours, spending time with the machinery, making adjustments or minor changes to it, service as well as observations, or adding improvements. We’ll also visit our suppliers to watch the other end of the chain," he says. "Our customers usually are appre-ciative that we’ve come. We’ll see the plant manager and spend time with the maintenance manager. They want to talk. They very often will come back to me with their ideas. Some of the things are not always practical but some of them are," he adds. The company’s aircraft has made many of these trips doable, particularly to remote sites, Hamblin says. "We are able to take more people than we might ordinarily have been able to. For instance, we had a trainee with us, who had just joined the company in the prior week. We were able to get him in front of the customer to see how our machines performed. It was a great opportunity for him. He got a lot of benefit from it, and it was a great education for him. He was pretty impressed with the installation." The CEO of another company also flying customer trips has coined the term "VOC Tours" (which stands for Voice of the Customer) for the practice of customer visits. Like Townsend, he routinely sends a team to meet customers, including a field service technician manager, the VP/general manager, the manufactur-ing manager, the customer service manager, several manufacturing lead people, electrical lead people and assembly lead people. "They review with the customer all the technical aspects of how the installation goes, how the equipment performed when it was delivered, what field service problems they are experiencing, what’s the history of what’s going on with the machine," the CEO says. At the customer’s end, the president, the general manager, the director of production and the director of operations typically all are present. "They spend the whole day together, just kind of going over what happened, what’s going on now, and what they would like to see in the future. We’re doing more and more and more of that," he adds. "Each time we’re going out, our usual people are there, but we’re bringing more and more of the engineering department and manufac-turing people on these trips so that we can expose them to comments like, ’Well, here’s what happens when you do something like this in manufactur-ing, and here’s how it impacts the customer, and here’s how they feel about it,’" he says. And everybody wins. "You know, what happens up here, and I’ve seen it happen, is that you get guys who are doing their thing up in engineering or manufacturing or whatever and if they’re never out in front of the cus-tomer in his face looking at what is going on, they just never understand what works for them and what doesn’t. "Getting our people, at all levels, down in front of the customer is so important. The customer likes it because it allows them to relate at different levels; they’re just not talking to a salesman. In turn, it gets us to relate to the customer and say, ŒWow. They’re a good company. They’re working hard. I can see where they are struggling with the way this works. Maybe we can modify it or maybe change the way we support them.’ It just really narrows the gap between you and your customers. That’s what that plane does. Hands down, if we didn’t have that plane, that would not be happening."