Cirrus shares vision for customer service excellence with Knoxville’s entrepreneurs
The Knoxville Entrepreneur Center and "THE WORKS" participants visited Cirrus Vision Center for a tour and educational experience.
The Cirrus experience is unlike any company we have ever seen. It is welcoming, exciting, and engaging. It leaves visitors with the “Wow factor,” and cultivates a craving for customers to come back.
Rebecca Nash, the company’s Senior Learning Specialist for the Cirrus Experience Learning and Development team said it’s part of the company’s core values to give the customers “world-class treatment.”
“How do you define that? We say it’s all about giving the customers what they want, when they want, and how they want it,” Nash said.
The founders participating in the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center’s THE WORKS program visited the Cirrus Vision Center on Wednesday to get a vision for excellent customer service.
It started with a tour and a mind-blowing example of how the experience is executed.
The Cirrus team walked the founders up to a garage door at the delivery center. They explained the process and allowed the group on the tour to experience it firsthand.
Imagine that the Cirrus team picks you up from the airport in a luxury vehicle. They know your favorite song and are playing it as they drive up to the garage. The door rises, slowly and all the lights are off. You hear your favorite song synched up inside the building. Your heart starts beater faster. Suddenly, spotlights shoot down from the ceiling and onto your newly manufactured, shiny private plane.
The company’s roots go back to 1984 in Baraboo, Wisconsin when Dale and Alan Klapmeier began working on their first VK-30 home-built airplane. That model of plane celebrated its first flight in 1988.
In 2017, Cirrus opened the Vision Center Campus in Knoxville, which hosts aircraft sales, delivery, flight training, maintenance, support, and personalization departments.
The Vision Center is also home to the only two Vision Jet flight simulators of their kind in the world. The massive simulation machine moves with the pilot and displays a simulated video on a big screen. It gives them the feeling of a real flight, without the risk.
“You can see the hundreds of people who have signed the wall and come through training here. Some as young as 18,” Nash said on the tour.
She walked the group over to the maintenance hangar, where a team was painting a plane. Nash explained how Cirrus planes use a special paint that can cost anywhere from $300-600 per gallon.
“It takes about a gallon and a half to cover the plane, plus tools, and almost eight weeks of labor costs,” she said.
In an industry where the best quality comes with a high price tag, Nash emphasized the importance of going above and beyond for the customer.
Participants in THE WORKS program took away some valuable advice and skills from the tour. Namely, great customer service can be achieved through hiring great, positive people who are committed to the company’s core values.
To demonstrate the success of their methods, Cirrus has shown substantial year-over-year growth in aviation sales.
According to Cirrus, the company delivered 539 SR Series aircraft in 2022 (SR20, SR22, SR22T), which was a 22 percent increase from 2021. Then, in 2023, the company had another record-breaking year selling 708 airplanes. Their reported billings were more than $930 million in 2023 – up more than 20 percent from 2022.
As founders of new companies, it was a good reminder that building a great reputation, and profit margin for a business takes time and concentrated effort.
Learn more about THE WORKS here.
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