Better ticketing helps Satair keep aircraft in the air

Anyone who has ever traveled by plane has been there—out on the tarmac, anticipating takeoff, when the pilot announces a mechanical issue, anything from a problem with the landing gear to a missing screw in the bathroom door. The plane must head back to the gate so it can be fixed.

This is frustrating and inconvenient for passengers, but for airlines, it can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime. 

Satair is an Airbus Services company that manages an intricate global network of parts logistics and suppliers, working to keep aircraft in service with the highest level of safety and efficiency. This calls for quick access to information and efficient response. But outdated email platforms and siloed communication methods slowed these efforts, particularly between Satair and key partners involved in daily operations. Parts requests often moved slowly and inefficiently, adding unnecessary delays in urgent situations.

“Our old way of doing business—using personal emails and having limited transparency across the company or across regions—was really hurting our customer service,” says Taylor Rubiano Glardon, business product owner.

By implementing a centralized ticketing system in Freshdesk, Satair has accelerated procurement, replacement, and repair processes for spare parts, minimizing downtime and keeping operations running smoothly. Now in use by over 1,200 agents, Freshdesk has helped Satair achieve a 40% reduction in ticket handling time, ensuring aircraft fleets remain operational, safe, and ready for takeoff.

The Company

Founded in 1957 and acquired by Airbus in 2011, Denmark-based Satair is one of the world’s leading suppliers of aircraft parts and aftermarket services. The company’s 1.900+ employees maintain a vast inventory of over one million spare parts for all types of aircraft.

The Challenge

To keep planes in the air, two teams at Satair need to have smooth and transparent communication at all times: Customer Resolution Services (CRS) and Supply Management teams. Relying on email platforms like Outlook, Gmail, and Litmos led to slow response times and confusion, causing support requests to be delayed and making it harder to resolve urgent issues—particularly costly in high-stakes aircraft on ground (AoG) situations. 

“We lacked a central, well-organized support system,” says Rubiano. “One-on-one email threads weren’t meant to scale, and uniting all of our unique business regions and industry subsets was an urgent priority.”

While Satair leaders were eager to enhance operational efficiency, they also recognized that the transition from email-based ticketing could present substantial change management challenges. Satair needed an intuitive, user-friendly, and adaptable solution from a partner that could provide robust support for onboarding and managing the change process. 

The Solution

Satair implemented Freshdesk as its centralized ticketing solution, collaborating closely with the Freshworks team throughout the rollout process. Freshworks developed over 15 custom apps tailored to Satair's unique workflows, ensuring the platform met specific needs. 

Freshworks’ professional services played a pivotal role in the onboarding process, conducting on-site training sessions and ensuring smooth adoption across seven regions.

Plus, the active support of Freshdesk Professional Services made implementation smoother, thanks to a series of targeted optimizations, enablement efforts, and fixes. Weekly connects established continuous collaboration, ensuring that Satair stays informed about product updates, as well as providing proactive oversight during key feature rollouts, and gathering customer input for the product roadmap. 

By continually offering proactive support, ongoing optimizations, and valuable product insights, Premium Support has helped Satair reduce downtime, optimize workflows, and improve service quality—making them more agile and better equipped to serve their customers.

“Freshworks Professional Services gave us confidence throughout that they would guide us expertly from start to finish,” says Janani Panchapakesan, Digital Product Owner. To build the best plan for onboarding teams to Freshdesk, Professional Services took the time to understand Satair’s business and which outcomes were most important. “They were able to translate our needs into Freshworks, challenging us to think differently about our processes and to use the power of the platform, applying best practices gleaned from their 1000s of projects,” she says.

Multiple Satair teams, including Customer Resolution Services, Supply Management, Aircraft on Ground, Customer Care, Repairs, and Warehousing, now use Freshdesk daily—in regions from China to North America. With Freshdesk, these teams efficiently route and resolve tickets from customers, suppliers, and employees. Automated ticket assignments, custom ticket forms, and parent-child ticketing work together to increase transparency and minimize response times. As a result, Satair’s 1,200 agents can move away from tedious email threads that are too easily lost, rerouted, or even forgotten.

This visibility also allows Satair to manage resources better and adapt to fluctuating demands, improving supply chain efficiency and productivity, reducing aircraft downtime for customers.

“When we implemented Freshdesk, we gained the ability to see exactly when requests were coming in per region,” says Michael Nicolai Folkmann Schjerbeck, Satair’s head of digital customer and partner experience. “This transparency now informs our staffing needs so that we can respond quickly and adapt as needed.”

Impact

Simply by replacing an email-based approach with Freshdesk reduced average handling time by 40%. Widespread adoption has also seen over 80% of two-way communication now happening within Freshdesk, leading to faster and more consistent interactions.

Freshdesk has improved communication and efficiency in handling support requests, paving the way for more transparent logistics. Looking forward, Satair also plans to add more self-service options for customers and integrate AI-powered workflows for faster responses, solidifying Freshdesk's role in the customer journey.