Delivering Excellent Service Quality in Aviation

A Practical Guide for Internal and External Service Providers

Mario Kossmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351945431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Aviation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

A practical and realistic guide for both external and internal service providers in an aviation context to implementing an effective way to control the service quality as perceived by their customers, Delivering Excellent Service Quality in Aviation is essential for those service providers that are not yet systematically managing their service quality. Offering a step-by-step and easy to understand framework, it also enables those service providers that are already proactively managing their service quality to build new techniques into current practice for maximum effect. By using this guide, decision-making as well as budget and capacity planning can be optimized and justified to any stakeholders in the service operation. Customer satisfaction can be improved considerably over time and, thereby, profits (or budget allocation for internal service providers). Crucially, the improvements the book provides can be systematically measured and easily disseminated throughout the organization, leading to increased levels of motivation amongst staff.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter Summary

The purpose of this chapter is to give you a brief overview of the content, context and usefulness of this book. In order to do this, the importance of controlling and improving service quality, both for external and internal service providers in the aviation industries, is highlighted. Then, the market for service providers in the aviation context, specifically within airline, airport and aircraft manufacturing operations, is discussed. Last, depending on your expectations from this book, three alternative ways of how the book could be read are suggested, so that you are only confronted with those parts of it that are most relevant to your situation.

Why You Should Read This Book

This book offers you a hands-on, step-by-step approach to service quality management as a practical guide for any service provider in the aviation industry, whilst, at the same time, containing more detailed reading about the underlying state-of-the-art theories, as well as practical experience with the suggested method in the form of a recent case study.

This book would be of interest to anybody who is delivering professional services to external or internal customers in the context of airline, airport and aircraft manufacturing operations (including respective suppliers and sub-contractors), and who wishes to measure and monitor (and therefore be able to control) perceived customer satisfaction with the services delivered over time. Their role could be that of brand manager, team leader, sub-unit leader or individual service provider.

This book is addressed at the same time to service providers in the context of airline, airport and aircraft manufacturing operations because all three domains are highly interdependent and have large overlap areas in their customer segments, the principal end customer segment being air traffic passengers. While this is obvious for airlines, it seems less so for aircraft manufacturers. Still, all major manufacturers are currently focusing their efforts to achieve even higher passenger orientation in designing their cabins. Similarly, many airports are going a long way in order to find out proactively what passengers want and need, and designing their operations and layouts accordingly.

The intention of this book is to be a practical and realistic guide to implementing (with minimum effort) an effective yet efficient way to control and proactively influence the service quality as perceived by the customer. The consequences of this are that users of this book who own decision-making, as well as budget and capacity planning, will be carrying out these activities on a sound basis, able to justify their decisions to any stakeholders in the service operation. Also, and most importantly, customer satisfaction can be improved considerably over time. Finally, improvements made can be systematically measured in the way suggested, which, in turn, leads to increased levels of motivation amongst an organization’s own personnel. By defining, quantifying and reporting quality, it is possible to enhance employee awareness of the fact that high quality is actually achievable and trainable at little cost, but that the potential benefits of delivering high quality services are likely to be very large.

Many of the principles underlying the method that is proposed in this book could be argued to be valid also in other technical and non-technical industry sectors. However, service providers in the aviation context (with its high complexity, fierce competition, rapid and innovative service and product developments) focus on service as one of the main marketing assets, and a high degree of internationality as the second most important: both are particularly in need of effective and efficient service quality management. Therefore, the examples used in this book (and in fact the whole book) are clearly rooted in the aviation context.

To summarize, this book offers any service provider in the aviation context – specifically within airline, airport and aircraft manufacturing operations – an efficient yet effective way to increase customer satisfaction and, thereby, profits (or budget allocation for internal service providers). Also, it helps service providers to create a sound basis for operational and strategic decision-making.

Why Does It Pay to Improve Service Quality?

Although cost factors are far from being unimportant, there is overwhelming evidence that service quality is the single most important issue in running customer service operations successfully. It can be argued that service quality directly and indirectly affects profits in a significant way, as Zeithaml and Bitner (2002) suggest (see Figure 1.1). They argue that high service quality leads to customer retention, which has shown to be cheaper in the long run than high levels of customer turnover. Also, long-term customers tend to buy larger volumes and higher price premium services and products. Very importantly, ‘word-of-mouth’ communications are affected in a positive way, being the most influential and convincing kind of communication in the field of services. If people talk positively to other potential customers about their experiences with the services delivered, the supplier’s market share is likely to grow, too. All this leads to higher possible margins. By means of more ‘offensive marketing’ (such as putting aggressive promotional campaigns into practice), market share can be affected, a positive reputation enhanced and the service offer can be positioned in a way to allow for premium pricing strategies. All this leads to higher sales levels. Both higher sales levels and higher achievable margins directly result in increased profits (Zeithaml and Bitner 2002).

Figure 1.1 Service quality spells profits

Adapted from Zeithaml and Bitner (2002)

In a context where a service provider operates in a cyclical downturn of an industry or mainly serves customers that do so, the question may well be how to cope better with lower and lower budgets or sales rather than how to increase budgets or sales.

Still, whether operating in a downturn or upturn of the market, it can be said that the better the service quality delivered to customers, the better the standing of a service provider in comparison to competitors (external service provider) or the easier it is to justify and defend a specific budget requested (internal service provider).

Provision of Service Quality by Internal Service Providers

Who are the Internal Service Providers?

In order to answer this question we should first look at some typical examples of internal and external service providers in the aviation context. Figure 1.2 gives a limited yet realistic systematic overview of typical service providers involved in airline, airport or aircraft manufacturing operations. Although clearly simplifying matters, the diagram illustrates the interdependence between some of the service operations from the three aviation segments considered.

Figure 1.2 Service providers in the aviation context (examples)

The most obvious service delivery takes place from an airline’s flight and cabin crew to their passengers. This external service provision to paying customers usually consists primarily of flying the passengers to their chosen destination safely and taking care of them during the journey on board.

However, in order to be able to offer that service to passengers, the flight and cabin crew need to take receipt of technical support and maintenance services so that the aircraft is fully airworthy and, for instance, inflight entertainment, galley and toilet systems are fully operational. These services can either be delivered by an internal service provider within the airline or they can be sub-contracted to an external service provider such as the technical services team of a different airline or an airport.

Both the flight crew and the technical services team must have their members trained so that they are sufficiently skilled to fly the aircraft or to maintain it respectively. An external service provider (usually the aircraft manufacturer that has produced the aircraft used by the airline) may deliver such training services.

This same service provider is likely to also offer training services internally to other teams within the aircraft manufacturing operations; for example, to the support services group that, in turn, may act as an external service provider to the airline’s technical services team in cases of more complicated maintenance or repair work.

Since most passengers prefer to fly in a clean aircraft, some cleaning services will have to be delivered to the flight and cabin crew. This is usually done by an external service provider from within the local airport operations. This service provider can either be an internal part of the airport operations or sub-contracted. It can also be argued that the cleaning services team directly serves the passengers insofar as the ‘personal space’ of an individual customer is cleaned, but there is no direct contractual relationship.

Finally, security services from within the airport operations act as an external service provider to the airline’s flight and cabin crew by protecting the aircraft on the ground and security-checking all the luggage to be taken on board as well as the passengers themselves. It can be argued that the security services are also directly delivered to passengers because the former represent protection of each passenger from physical harm through acts of violence: at many airports passengers have to pay an explicit security fee. This kind of service is very often sub-contracted to experienced security companies that meet the demanding requirements of the local authorities.

To summarize the above, it can be argued that service providers in all three aviation segments under consideration find themselves in a network of highly interdependent external and internal customer-supplier relationships. Many service providers do not directly serve their end customers but rather serve another service provider who does. In order for them to optimize and generally improve their service quality, it is very seldom sufficient to merely talk to the ‘middleman’ (that is, the service provider directly served); end customers and their needs and wants must be understood.

Hence, successful aircraft manufacturers not only talk to airlines but also, just as importantly, to passengers in order to find out about their requirements. Similarly, the best airports in terms of quality do not just talk to customer airlines, but also to end customers – that is, passengers.

The Importance of Providing Service Quality

Having looked at some typical service providers from the aviation context, we should now address the above question of why service quality is equally important to internal service providers. Whether you are an external or internal service provider, customers will finally make available those resources you need to run your service operation – this may be by receiving direct payments for services delivered to an external customer or by being allocated a specific budget inside a bigger company or institution. Such budget allocations are likely to happen in longer time intervals, often on a yearly basis. Still, some decision-makers in your organization will regularly look at what services you are providing internally and what added value lies in using your services. It does not come as a surprise that if your internal customers are not convinced that your service delivery makes a difference, the budgets allocated to you will at least be reduced if not suspended altogether.

If, however, you deliver excellent service quality:

• your internal customers will realize that you do add value to their processes and appreciate your contributions;

• the budgets necessary t...