Importance Of Customer Service In Aviation Industry

Customer Service and Its Impact on Sales and Profit

Write a Diagnostic Project Report and Guidelines about United Airline cases.

In the present internet era, the customer service is of utmost importance as it can directly affect the sales of the organization. The customer service is also liked with different components such as product innovation and pricing. It is also directly linked with the organization’s ability to generate profits. Through customer service, the organization change the perception of the customer’s through word of mouth. It is important to manage the experience of the customer’s in all their interactions and track them to maintain a healthy relationship. It is important for the business organizations to build strong positive customer experience, which can only be achieved by involving strategy, integrating technology, developing business models and managing brands (Arif, Gupta & Williams, 2013).

The management of the customer experience requires discipline, methodology and integration of different processes for the cross-cultural exposure, interaction, and transaction of the company, product, brand, and service. The customer experience requires designing, delivering, and development of strategies, which can effectively deliver excellent customer experience. The aim of managing the customer experience is ensuring high quality customer experience which can increase the loyalty of the customers (Arif, Gupta & Williams, 2013). The current customers can advocate the use of potential customers with the help of word of mouth marketing.

In the service –oriented industry, customer satisfaction is of prime importance. The civil aviation industry is also a service-oriented industry as there is high importance of customer service in aviation industry. The service quality increases the customer satisfaction which can build customer loyalty. A comprehensive customer satisfaction can result when each member of organization has an overall understanding of different customer needs and requirements. The customer service is an important aspect of the needs and requirements of the customer and impacts the overall profits and the sales of the organization. The airports or aviation provide high importance to the improvement of the service quality. In aviation industry, the services have to focus to reduce the travel time and increase the leisure time in different areas of customer service. The customer satisfaction is a cyclic process which can increase or decrease with time. Therefore, it is important that the organization provide comprehensive services (Arif, Gupta & Williams, 2013). There are two fundamental forces which can increase the profits in the aviation industry, which are: safety and customer service.

Managing Customer Experience for Building Customer Loyalty

There are several aspects such as handling the customer complaints and customer safety can attract the customer the customers towards thee airlines. There are several areas such as customer priority, performance parameters, performance standard, and service opportunities which evaluates the services provided to the customers (Gupta, Arif, & Williams, 2013). However, there are several instances, in which the organization fails to provide proper customer service to the customers. United express, a United Airlines branch treated one of the customers in a bad manner. The airport police forcible removed one of the passenger after he refused to leave the airplane voluntarily. The passenger has paid for the ticket and was allocated a seat; however, still he was removed from the seat. There was a huge controversy related to the treatment of the passenger. He was a doctor and stated that the needed to see some patients urgently. Before the confrontation, the airline manager offered the customers travel vouchers to voluntarily leave the flight. However, no passenger accepted.

Later, four passengers were selected to vacate the seat for the four airline employees from the computer algorithm on a random basis. The three of the employees accepted the announcement; however, the fourth passenger did not move from his place. The management called the airplane police, who forced the passenger to leave. The fourth volunteer, a 69 year old doctor, David Dao was forced to leave, he was pushed and pulled; as a result, he suffered from various injuries to his heads and mouth. The crew members misbehaved with the passenger. The event was condemned by the media professionals; however, the response of the owner of the website was very casual. There has been discussion that the passenger has been under attack because of his Vietnamese Chinese ethnicity. It has been the most trending topic on the Chinese micro-blogging Weibo. It damaged the reputation of the company and a large number of people avoided travelling on the airlines. It reduced the profitability of the organization. In this regard, the research questi

on for the present report can be developed as:

Is there any impact of customer service on the customer satisfaction and loyalty?Does the customer satisfaction of the organization impacts its overall profitability?

Is there any cultural or ethnic bias in the services and offers provided to different customers?

In the present case of United Airlines, the role of ethnic and cultural differences in the services offered to different customers has been examined. Moreover, the importance of the customer services in the development of customer loyalty and the overall profits of the organization has been examined. The interview method has been adopted to answer the questions of the present research study. Interview is one of the most popular research method which is used in answering the research questions in several different domains (Miles & Gilbert, 2005). The present research explores the correlation between customer satisfaction and its overall profitability. Therefore, it is an exploratory research. The interview is a popular method which is used to explore some new information related to the research questions. It is a qualitative research method in which the information obtained in qualitative in nature. In qualitative research, the information obtained has no statistical sections; therefore, the coding of such information is quite challenging. However, this research method is still popular as it yields some new information related to the research (Gillham, 2001).

Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction in Aviation Industry

The interview method can be conducted in several ways such as structured interview, semi-structured interview and unstructured interview. The basic difference between these methods is designing of the questionnaire. In the structured interview, the questionnaire of the research is designed beforehand (Mann, 2016). The interviewer asks the same questions and do not deviate from them. On the other hand, in semi-structured interview, the questions of the interview are not predetermined; however, the researcher decide the basic direction of the research. In the unstructured interview process, neither the direction of the interview nor the questions of the questions of the interview are decided for the interview process (Seidman, 2015). The interview asks questions by taking lead from the previous answers of the interviewee.

In the present research, an interview has been conducted with two employees of United Airlines. Their personal views were asked about the impact of the incident on the reputation of the airlines. The interviewees were asked regarding the strategies of the organization to handle the situation. The interview was analyzed with the coding strategy. It is the most common method to code or analyze qualitative data (Gubrium & Holstein, 2002). In this method, the data from the similar category are given similar codes and they are categorized in one section. Afterwards, the researcher derives logical conclusion from the data under one category.

Although the interview method is one of the most common method for the data collection, there are also several bias and limitation of the method. One of the most common problem in the interview method is the long-winded answers or the participants often wandering off the main topic. There is also the issue of bias in the interview method. Bias can emerge from the human interaction between the interviewee and the interviewer. The bias can also be introduced from the side of the respondents. The respondents can give biased answers when they are familiar with the interviewer, or they want to answer in a socially desirable manner, or if they are biased towards the sponsor of the research. In research, several people report inaccurately on sensitive and personal topics. Another source of bias can emerge from the researcher. Confirmation is the most common bias which emerges from the researcher. In research, confirmation bias occurs when the researcher forms a hypothesis and use user’s response to validate or confirm that belief. The confirmation bias can emerge as the researcher validate or examine different hypothesis. The cultural bias is another bias which emerges from judging and examining the culture of different person by the values of another person (Alshenqeeti, 2014).

The United Airlines Controversy and Its Impact on Reputation and Profitability

In the service industry, the services provided to the customers is of utmost importance as it impacts the overall customer experience. The aviation is the part of the service industry; therefore, it is necessary that the organizations in the industry becomes customer-oriented to increase the level of customer satisfaction. With the commercialization of both local and international flights, the companies need to develop a competitive advantage to increase their customer base. In the recent years, several low-cost airlines have also entered into the consumer market which has increased the competition in the airlines industry (Arif, Gupta & Williams, 2013). With the competition, the opportunities have also increased in the industry. The opportunities have increased due to heightened demand in the industry, with globalization and the growth of trade and commerce in the industry. The growth of the aviation industry has increased the consumer demand for the better service. Over the years, the government has also deregulated the industry and several private airlines have also entered the market due to the high demands.

In the same regard, the interview respondents have also supported that it is important to focus on the core competency of the organization with the growing demand in the aviation industry. With globalization and commercialization, the demand of the business travelers has increased in aviation. There are a large number of business consumers who regularly fly to close different business dealings. They are very vigilant of the flight timings and punctuality and are frequent travelers (Tsaur, Chang & Yen, 2002). Other than that, there is also increase in the number of leisure travelers who try to seek comfort in their travel. Most of the airlines have created their core competency and target customers accordingly.

The condition of the intense competition has resulted the companies in innovate in terms of both services and technology. They are used to deliver better services and safety to the customers. The traditional airlines providing all types of services are superseded by the low cost carriers as they provide basic services at low cost (Gittell, 2003). These airlines adopt a low cost strategy with optimal utilization of resources.

According to the research respondents, United Airlines is a low cost airline. It provides efficient services in domestic routes. However, there are only a few competitors in the USA in the domain of low cost flights. Therefore, the incident of forced eviction has little negative impact on the overall sales of the organization. However, the incident has initiated the debate of cultural issues and the company might face issues while entering the foreign markets. Moreover, several of the customers of Asian and African ethnicity have started avoiding the airlines. The government has also intervened to protect the rights of the customers. It has invited criticism from international authorities and tarnished the name of the company in front of its customers.

Research Questions and Methodology

There are several definitions of customer satisfaction provided by different authors. The customer satisfaction paradigm emphasize on the cognitive process which results in the satisfaction of customers. It refers to the consumer response to the evaluation of perceived expectation from a product or service and the actual product or service. The satisfaction is a complex phenomenon which involves several cognitive, affective, and other psychological dynamics. In the service industry, the customer satisfaction can be measured in two broad categories. The first category measures the level of customer satisfaction and issues in the service delivery. It is a diagnostic tool which can be used by the managers to find the loopholes in the services offered by them (Huang, 2010). The next category examines the customer satisfaction with different factors such as service quality, perceived image of the brand, and the perceived quality. The service quality and the perceived brand value are important determinants of the service quality. These factors are used to analyze the customer loyalty in the industry. The customer loyalty is an important determinant and can result in repetitive customers (Skogland & Siguaw, 2004).

The research respondents have also agreed that the customer satisfaction is an important determinant in developing loyal customer base. When a customer is satisfied with the services of one aviation company, then they become a frequent traveler with that airlines. The company also try to develop loyal customer base by offering several offers, discounts and loyalty bonus. However, manhandling and such incidence reduce the loyalty of the customers and several customers stop taking the services of the airlines. The respondent have also suggested that the loyal customers bring new customers through word of mouth (Ryan & Huimin, 2007). In the present era of social media and internet, the reviews and the responses of the customers is very essential in maintaining the brand image and positive perception in front of customers. However, if the organization is focused on its effective marketing strategies, then they will also be spread quickly.

The service quality is another important aspect in increasing the overall customer satisfaction and establishing the superiority of the product or service as compared to the other competitors. It is also an important determinant in the customer or the brand loyalty. It can be critiqued that the quality of service offered to different customers is important for an organization as it can increase the customer purchase behavior and the performance of the organization as compared to the competitors. The customer service quality is the perception of the customer related to the functional and the technical qualities of the product (Roades & Waguespack 2008). The technical quality refers to the features of the product which the consumer get in the interaction between the customer and the buyer. The functional quality of the service refers to the encounter of the customers with the employees. The service quality can also be referred as the gap between the perception of the customer and the expectations of the performance.

Interview Method and Its Biases

The interview respondents have also supported that the service quality has several dimensions and features and it directly impacts on the level of customer satisfaction. As per the literature, there are several aspects of service quality such as reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. The employees familiar with the concept of customer service and service quality are better able to satisfy their customers. When the respondents were asked about the cultural discrimination, they stated that the organizations are quite strict about these matters (Noor, 2005). Proper training is provided to all the employees so that they can serve the customers in a proper manner. Moreover, if any bias occurs, it can only be a result of personal issue or bias.

Recommendations and Conclusion

It can be concluded that there are several strategies used by the companies in the aviation industry to increase their profitability. The aviation companies can be categorized in two categories, namely, low cost airlines as well as the full service airlines. The low cost airlines emphasize on the price offered to different customers whereas the full service airlines emphasize on the quality of services. United Airs is a low cost airline. Customer satisfaction model stress on the cognitive process which results in the satisfaction of customers. It refers to the consumer response to the difference between perceived expectation from a product or service and the actual product or service. The satisfaction is a complex phenomenon which involves several cognitive, affective, and other psychological dynamics. The interview method is selected to obtain the views of industry experts related to the customer service in aviation.

It can be recommended that the companies in this category should focus on the prices offered to the customers. At each flight, the company should focus on optimally utilizing the resources to provide the customers with the lowest fare (Lovelock & Wirtz, 2007). 

It can also be recommended that in case of dilemma of complex decision making, the staff members should be careful of the legislations and the company’s policy. It is important to provide training to the customers so that they abide by organization polices at all times (Namkung & Jang, 2007).

References

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