Honeywell's Adrian Paull

In the 10 months since Rob Gillette took over as CEO of Honeywell, massive change has roiled the company and a large reorganization is underway. Where there used to be, in the customer and product support areas, multiple points of entry for Honeywell customers, now those have all been consolidated and assigned to one person, vice president customer and product support Adrian Paull. As you'll read, Paull has strong opinions about how a large company like Honeywell ought to serve every last customer and he is busy now putting his beliefs into practice.

Do you understand customer needs?
I wouldn't say I understand it at the full organization level, at this point. That's part of the challenge. We're organized in a lot of separate businesses and those businesses each had their objectives. When you group it all together, there are some entirely new objectives which are possible and a lot of integration of customer offerings which can be made.

How does your background fit the new job?
I have 25 years in aerospace. I joined Sperry Flight Systems, which then became Honeywell and became a larger Honeywell in combination with AlliedSignal. I spent the entire time in various customer service roles. I have performed at one time or another all of the different roles that exist in my new customer service and product support organization.

How do you turn goals into reality?
I have a hypothesis that our entire aerospace industry is primarily driven by engineering innovation. We have great examples of production innovation. Most aerospace manufacturers compete on the basis of advanced product technology. We are an industry of engineers. Service has not been a part of our DNA. There lies some of the challenge and opportunity. The total value to customers now includes the service experience as part of a holistic experience.

Have other industries done this?
We've been increasingly aware that our customers experience these customer benchmarks every day, when they buy coffee from Starbucks or clothes from Nordstrom. We'll be designing experiences for customers based on their behavior and their wishes. We don't just want to reinvent practices brought up in this industry.

What will impress the customer?

Right now if somebody orders a part from Honeywell on an AOG basis, we will assume they want to have the airwaybill communicated through the standard mechanics that we use. It might be e-mail or fax. But it's clear to us that urgent matters need to be dealt with differently. If you do business in the financial segment and if you were to perform some sort of trade over the phone, the paperwork follows later and summarizes the discussion. The requirements are communicated verbally, the response verbally. That's unusual in this industry. We receive literally thousands of orders from customers, low dollar, yet requiring them to confirm in writing via fax or e-mail to place a formal PO. Our call center will simply record that discussion with the customer and dispatch the parts. It works well in other industries, it will work well with us, too.

What are the quantifiable benchmarks that will show progress?

Key measures will be around speed of response, the time to get a fix, and the priority established around key processes. We're establishing priority with customers, which areas need to receive the focus from their perspective. We'll measure our success in terms of the customer's measures. It's a cultural change for us, a level of commitment to customers that's been unavailable before. We're trying to focus on projects that will get us to our goal. Like a single 800 number and look and feel for websites. We had viewed our customers by product standpoint. But customers are not organized that way.

Is upper management behind this massive change?

We're really trying to change our whole mentality towards customers. We started to record customer calls that come into our call centers and burning them on CD and distributing them to the leadership teams. Instead of listening to NPR [radio station] in their car, they are listening to the customer. What are things the customer calls on, how do we address that, what is our agent saying, how effectively do we resolve the problem? It's a different approach to accommodate customers this way. I'll be constantly feeding the leadership team and our CEO himself with these CDs.

Are you excited?

Excited? I am very very excited. I feel like I've been given a tremendous opportunity, to set a new benchmark in our industry. -- By Matt Thurber