Project Manager – Service & Customer Relationship

Role Overview

General Aeronautics is a high-performance Agri-Drone company with 400+ drones deployed across India. As GA sharpens its focus on reliability, uptime, and disciplined growth, service excellence becomes a core competitive differentiator.We are looking for a Senior Project Manager – Service & Customer Relationship who will own and scale GA’s post-sales service operations across Pan-India.This role is not a coordination role. This is an execution and performance ownership role — responsible for uptime, turnaround time, spare management, SLA discipline, and continuous improvement of deployed fleet performance.You will operate at the intersection of Service, Product, Engineering, and Manufacturing — ensuring customer satisfaction translates into operational excellence and margin protection.

Key Responsibilities

Fleet Reliability & Uptime Ownership

• Own national fleet uptime metrics across all deployed drones.
• Monitor Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), incident recurrence rate, and SLA compliance.
• Identify systemic issues from service logs and escalate root causes to Engineering & Product.
• Drive corrective and preventive action mechanisms (CAPA).

Service Operations Leadership (Pan-India)

• Lead and manage CRM teams, regional Service Engineers, and support staff across India.
• Conduct daily and weekly operational reviews.
• Ensure ticket resolution within defined SLAs.
• Standardize service processes across regions.

Service Process Optimization & SOP Discipline

• Design, refine, and enforce SOPs for issue resolution, warranty handling, insurance claims, and field diagnostics.
• Ensure Engineering Change Management (ECM) updates are tracked and implemented across fleet.
• Build structured service playbooks and escalation matrices.

Inventory & Spare Parts Governance

• Oversee spare part planning, allocation, and utilization across hubs and service centers.
• Optimize inventory turns while ensuring minimal downtime.
• Build predictive spare forecasting models based on failure patterns.
• Reduce working capital lock-in via structured spare governance.

Data, Dashboards & AI -Driven Monitoring

• Use centralized dashboards tracking ticket trends, failure clustering, MTTR, and region-wise performance.
• Use telemetry and log data for predictive maintenance.
• Use AI -based issue clustering and trend detection.
• Present structured monthly reliability reports to leadership.

Cross-Functional Coordination

• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Manufacturing, and BU Heads to resolve recurring issues.
• Drive closed-loop feedback system from field to engineering.

Customer Experience & Retention Support

• Ensure high customer satisfaction and service responsiveness.
• Monitor complaint frequency and escalation rate.
• Support customer onboarding and service readiness programs.
• Contribute to retention and repeat order growth through service excellence.

Key KPIs

• Fleet Uptime %
• MTTR (Mean Time to Repair)
• SLA Compliance %
• Repeat Issue Rate
• Spare Inventory Turnover
• Ticket Resolution Time
• Customer Satisfaction Score (NPS / Complaint Rate)
• ECM Compliance %
• Warranty Claim Cycle Time

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering / Technology (Mechanical, Electronics, Aerospace preferred); MBA is a plus.
• 5+ years of experience in Service Operations, Customer Relationship Management, Technical Field Support, Hardware Project Management, or Drone/Robotics/IoT domains.
• Experience managing Pan-India distributed service teams.
• Strong understanding of SLA frameworks, ticketing & CRM systems, spare inventory management, and hardware lifecycle management.
• Strong analytical and operational execution skills.
• Proven ability to drive cross-functional resolution.

Preferred Experience

• Exposure to drone technology and UAV operations.
• Experience with aviation compliance or ECM processes.
• Familiarity with telemetry analytics and log-based debugging.
• Experience implementing service dashboards or BI tools.
• Comfort using AI tools to automate reporting and operational analysis.

Key Attributes

• High ownership mindset – treats uptime as personal KPI.
• Process-driven and disciplined.
• Strong bias toward execution.
• Field-oriented and hands-on.
• Data-driven decision maker.
• Calm under operational pressure.
• Comfortable working in high-growth startup environment.

What Success Looks Like

• Fleet uptime consistently above target.
• Reduced service turnaround time quarter-on-quarter.
• Lower recurrence of technical failures.
• Structured service dashboards with actionable insights.
• Improved spare efficiency and reduced working capital strain.
• Strong alignment between service and engineering.
• Service excellence becoming a competitive advantage for GA.