Airline service with a smile still matters, researchers find

Airline service with a smile still matters, researchers find

BY PAM SHERIDAN
Special to the Rice News

Air travel in the 21st century is an ordeal: endless security lines, constant delays, cramped seats and shrinking or disappearing food service. An airline still can make the flying public happy, though, by offering well-trained, friendly faces. Research shows that nothing matters to travelers as much as the way they are treated by airline employees.

Even as many of today’s airlines scramble to meet their departure and arrival schedules and improve their in-flight amenities, such as seat comfort and food, they appear to place less importance on the one factor that most influences passenger satisfaction — their employees’ interactions with customers.

In recent studies on customer satisfaction in U.S. domestic air travel, management and marketing experts at Rice and Cornell University identified employee interactions as almost four times more important to airline customers than any other factor. The researchers also found that the importance of various aspects of airline travel for customer satisfaction differs depending on the person’s age, gender, income and travel experience.

“How a person processes information related to satisfaction can differ depending on individual characteristics and circumstances,” explained Shannon Anderson, associate professor of management at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, who, along with Lisa Klein Pearo, assistant professor of marketing at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, and Sally Widener, assistant professor of management at the Jones School, authored the research project titled “Drivers of Customer Satisfaction in U.S. Domestic Air Travel.”

“We were interested in seeing how different customer characteristics affected the weight or importance the passenger gave to different attributes within airline industry service,” Anderson said.

The researchers found, for example, that men place greater importance on the quality of an airline’s food, while women care more about how they’re treated by the employees. Older customers were the only group to show a significant interest in the plane’s operational performance, and thus their satisfaction was influenced by engine noise, turbulence or smoothness of the flight.

Overall, older passengers proved to be more satisfied than younger people. However, in contrast to previous studies, which have tended to find that women are more satisfied than men, the researchers found no differences in the level of satisfaction for men and women after taking into consideration the different weights that men and women place on factors such as employee interactions.

When comparing classes of customers, those in first class expressed lower levels of satisfaction. The researchers suspect that this reflects a situation in which first-class customers have different service expectations than coach customers and that on balance these higher expectations aren’t being met.

Anderson and her colleagues also examined whether the importance of an airline’s travel schedule, on-time reliability or service quality to customers’ purchase decisions influenced their subsequent satisfaction with the company’s service.

“We found that for customers whose purchase is highly influenced by these factors, satisfaction with the service depends disproportionately on performance of these dimensions,” Anderson said. “That finding is particularly important for airlines that claim superb performance in a specific service, since overall customer satisfaction will depend on whether the airline delivers on the claim.”

The study’s findings also provide important evidence for airline executives in their ongoing debate over how to allocate scarce resources to increase customer satisfaction.

“With few exceptions, most airlines don’t seem to appreciate that their employees can offer a distinctive, comparative advantage over their competition,” Anderson said. “A properly trained employee can make what otherwise seems like a commodity service into a personalized, positive experience for every customer.”