Talon Air is a leading private jet charter company ready to go the extra mile for its customers. It provides a world-class travel experience for charterers and helps high-net-worth individuals eliminate the cost of owning a private airplane.
Based in New York, Talon Air is an FAA-certified 145 maintenance facility, Part 135 Air Carrier, and FAA Part 91 certified, which allows the company to sell or acquire new jets, charter jets under revenue, and fly jets for business. On any given day, their team manages 40+ client aircraft, brokers services with dozens of other charter vendors, and assigns their 100+ pilots to trips across the globe.
Besides its airtight operations, Talon Air is known for top-notch customer care. Agents handle everything from itineraries to customs to on-site catering, ensuring smooth trips for clients, and repeat revenue for their owners.
Talon Air employees use Front to mitigate the complexity of running an end-to-end charter business and uphold the company’s reputation as the one-stop shop for private jet management in the US.
Challenge
Talon Air used to work from a shared inbox in Outlook, with colors to denote who should handle what. But because the team worked in 4-on/4-off rotations, folks could get color-tagged on an email when they weren’t on the clock, prolonging the time clients went without an answer.
Even when team members were on shift, they would sometimes collide when trying to respond quickly. Matt Zodda, Director of Client Assurance at Talon Air, shares: “Team members would step on each other’s toes when they were in the same room working the same inbox. Sometimes, they’d end up sending clients double replies.”
As part of their shared inbox workflow, team members would drag conversations into subfolders for easy reference. Over time, some agents began skipping this manual step, forcing managers and other team members to rely on Outlook’s limited search functionality and extending response times for escalated issues.
Besides hampering employee productivity, Outlook also made it difficult for managers to measure team member performance and intervene during critical teaching moments. To continue delivering exceptional service, Talon Air needed a tool to simplify the agents’ workflow and keep them on task — 24/7, 365 days a year.
Solution
Just one demo of Front sealed the deal. With its ample routing, collaboration, and analytics features, Matt was convinced Front could provide the level of efficiency the team needed.
“I’m shocked that more people in this industry don’t know about Front. It helps us stay on top of client communications and get them answers fast.”
Boosting productivity with a clean UI, built-in routing, and automation
Talon Air agents have a lot to keep tabs on — monitoring that day’s flights, organizing the next day’s trips, sending client and owner notifications, assigning crews, and fighting the occasional fire.
Managing these threads in Outlook was confusing at best. In Front, the agents get a far more streamlined experience.
Today, they see separate inboxes for client assurance-related emails, quotes, and sister company communications. Less pressing emails, like those from the National Business Aviation Association Airmail marketplace, get auto-archived to a different inbox for future use. From this bird’s-eye view, agents can easily prioritize the most pressing emails now and snooze the others for later.
When they’re ready to work a message, Front puts the most relevant information at their fingertips, automatically pulling up an owner’s name, executive assistant, and jet tail number — no more digging through Avianis and other systems for these details.
Because of the influx of new aircraft, it can be tough to keep track of every single owner or executive assistant. Inboxes and auto-tagging have helped us be much quicker to respond because we can find things quickly.
To save agents even more time, Matt set up message templates for crew trip sheets, ground transportation, and catering requests. Rather than starting from scratch, agents can customize a nearly complete message, getting responses out the door faster without compromising Talon Air’s top-tier brand.
Templates have been especially helpful for other document-heavy requests, like international flights. Some countries require up to ten documents before jets can land in their airspace. Matt says, “Being able to build these repositories in seconds rather than taking 15 minutes to find all of these documents has dramatically improved our productivity.”
Promoting collaboration with Front’s shared workspace
Evaluating team performance in Outlook was near-impossible. Per Matt, “There was no real way to quantify how well or how much workload people were handling without physically being in the office and watching them or being copied on every single email.”
Front, however, gives him instant visibility into team productivity. He can see exactly how many emails agents send and when they sent them. And he’s even set 30-minute warnings and 45-minute SLAs to keep him and his team on track — a capability he didn’t have in Outlook.
Added visibility has also encouraged agents to loop mentors in when they’re not sure how to respond to a client. With a simple @mention, they can point managers to the exact part of the email they need help with.
Matt describes, “Front shows me where my attention is needed immediately versus getting a message from an agent in Slack and then going and finding the email they forwarded me for context.”
A more transparent environment gets agents the answers they need quickly and allows managers to reinforce best practices when working with Talon Air’s VIP clientele.
Front helps with cross-departmental communication, too. If an agent is working with accounting to reconcile invoices, for example, they can link straight to the email highlighting a client’s agreed-upon services.
Streamlining agent workflows with native integrations
Before Front, switching back and forth between Outlook and other tools was a major time suck. Front’s native integrations and Dynamic Objects have alleviated that strain on agents, keeping them working in a centralized workspace.
Front’s integration with Slack, for example, automatically pushes terminal arrival and departure notifications to a specific channel — what was previously a manual copy/paste process. With a direct connection between Front and WhatsApp, agents can chat with clients or search for conversations without opening another screen.
And Front’s dynamic objects feature auto-links Talon Air’s aircraft scheduling software to quotes so team members don’t waste time searching for hotel or limo confirmations, related permits, or other trip information in another app.
Before, agents had to log into Avianis, enter a trip number, copy data, and paste it into an email — a process that could take 5 to 10 minutes. Now, Front’s dynamic objects grab it for them.
Upholding top-notch service without compromising work-life balance
When Talon Air first moved over to Front, the team was skeptical. But according to Matt, “Once they used it for a couple of weeks, they were just like, ‘I don’t know how we survived without this.’”
Switching to Front and streamlining manual tasks has compounded into 30 hours saved per agent per week. With less busy work, agents have cut their response times in half, resulting in better experiences for Talon Air clients — and for them personally.
Being on Front for 4 years now, I can’t imagine using another solution. It would disturb work life balance. It would make it harder to find things. We’re even working on expanding to more teams like accounting because it will literally save their lives.
It’s not just Matt who sees Front as a game-changer. One agent’s feedback says it all: “Front is the best thing Matt ever did for Talon Air.”
