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DOI Prefix 10.20431 |
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Customer Complaints and Their Types in Airline Industry: A Descriptive Exploration of Service Failures in Airline Services
Ms. Maria Fatima De Souza alias Fatima Sousa1, MDr. Ms. Purva Hegde Desai2
2.Associate Professor Department of Management Studies Goa University, Taligao Plateau, Goa
Citation : Ms. Maria Fatima De Souza alias Fatima Sousa, Dr. Ms. Purva Hegde Desai, Customer Complaints and Their Types in Airline Industry: A Descriptive Exploration of Service Failures in Airline Services International Journal of Managerial Studies and Research 2015 , 3(10) : 73-86
The Aviation industry has moved towards liberalization in the ownership of national carriers,
capacity sharing, price controls and market access, leading to greater competition among airlines (Khan,
Rajdutt, & Bansal, 2009).
All air Carriers recognize that customer satisfaction and the perception of quality is important to the consumer
who has a choice of Air Carriers, with multiple carriers providing the same basic service of transportation
(Headley & Bowen, 1997).However, there is also reduction in the average quality of service provided to the
customers(Khan, Rajdutt, & Bansal, 2009).
The first law of quality is to do it right for the first time (Lovelock, Patterson, & Walker, 2001) but despite of
efforts things do go wrong. The fact that services happen in the interaction between individuals and that the
customer often participates in the production process, leads to special quality management problems
(Edvardsson, 1992), consequently in the delivery of service, mistakes and failures are inevitable (Johnson,
&Michel, 2008).
A customer oriented complaint management seems to be an antecedent of acceptable service quality. Interviews
with business passengers and the airlines complaints department indicate that complaints procedures are often
felt to be complicated and time consuming by passengers (Edvardsson, 1992.)
Hence, this research has the following objectives :
The design of this research included two stages. In first stage, the methodology was in-depth exploratory interviews with officials of eight airlines. In the second stage, an instrument was developed to classify the complaint situation based on perceived severity and controllability. These were linked to typology of complaints.
The findings have managerial implications of providing appropriate redress to complaints and can better the customer retentions rates.