Service Failure in the Airline Industry
The problematic issue that is facing the airlines in the current years has been service failure, which has attained considerable interest between the service organizations and academics for numerous reasons. Researchers have defined service failure as the unfair situations that happen when the perceptions held by initial behavior of service delivery that does not satisfy customers’ expectations (Leow, 2015). The service provider is likely to fail to meet the expectation of the customers following the fact that human nature and human faults, errors, and mistakes are hard to avoid. However, these are the failures that result in customers’ dissatisfaction. It’s also notable that service failure results in a decline in the confidence of customers’ confidence, an undesirable word-of-mouth marketing together with direct cost re-performing the service. In the article Service failure and loyalty: an exploratory empirical study of airline customers by Adrian Palmer and David Bejo its identified that the concept of a “relationship lifecycle” is being increasingly utilized in marketing to identify customer segments (Bejou, & Palmer, 1998). The author has liked diverse points with the lifecycle with divergent sets of relationship prospects and stages of service failure tolerance. It’s also added that the way customers’ relationship is administered has inclined change into customer experience such that the relationship principles in lifecycles have been utilized in mapping customer “expeditions” within a service procedure.
There are numerous things that can be implied from the article finding. That is in the current competitive business ground, a large portion of airline companies put a lot of concentration towards that maintenance and management of their customers. The reason behind this is that nowadays there are complaints from customers anytime that these companies fail to meet their expectations. In this regard, business firms are also on the lookout for diverse ways that they can be able to cob the ever-growing complaints from customers as well as the reduction of service failure. Although these airline companies do not stand a chance of eliminating all the complaints, they are getting wisdom in the way they handle the already manifested service failure from their organization. Moreover, delivery of quality service is never a one day job, instead of a competitive edge that the organizations must have over others. Humans are not perfect, meaning that the service failures will continue being part of the airline companies. However, as these failures take place, service recovery must be understood that is not an automatic one. In other words, to correct the errors made by service providers calls for a lot of effort.
The airline firms cannot handle all components of delivering quality service as a result of their unique nature of services in this industry. In this case, customer loyalty is crucial; in case of service failure, a loyal customer will continue his or her intentional act of buying a firm’s favored products or services for a prolonged period of time. In other words, Customer loyalty is crucial in the current competitive world business arena (Atuo & Kalu, 2017). Many airline companies have come up with their loyalty programs in order to enhance their customers’ passionate commitment to repurchasing or rebuying their preferred service over and over again. In general, the key theme that customer loyalty runs through is the amount of costs devoted to a precise brand or store (Gee et al., 2008). Customers who are loyal assist in promoting the business by offering an encouraging word of mouth (WOM), building positive business recommendations, and references.
References
Atuo, E. C., & Kalu, S. E. (2017). Service failure recovery and customer loyalty: a study of airline industry in Nigeria. International Journal of Marketing and Communication Studies, 2(2), 33-46.
Bejou, D., & Palmer, A. (1998). Service failure and loyalty: an exploratory empirical study of airline customers. Journal of services marketing.
Leow, S. C. (2015). Airline service failure and recovery: a conceptual and empirical analysis (Doctoral dissertation, University of Salford).